A home for Justin and his family

Justin is an Ola Fou graduate and a former member of the team in Port Moresby, PNG. It took Justin two years to build his house and just 2 hours for his family home to be flattened.

Justin was living on “customary land” – not necessarily a squatter settlement in the usual sense of the word, but one where tenure is by right of custom through continued occupation, sometimes over many generations.

Whether through corruption or incompetence or a combination of both, the land was sold by the Government to a developer without any consideration of the people already living there. So the developer is now the only party that holds a legal title to the land. The developer (backed by the police) sent in the bulldozers with only a few minutes notice, now Justin and his neighbours have not only lost their homes, but also most of their possessions (electrical appliances, furniture etc). Land holdings around Gerehu have been a problem for years as Port Moresby expands – similar to the problems in Honiara where the best land with sea views etc has ended up in largely ownership by people from other countries in recent years.

Justin has moved into temporary accommodation, a shared shelter with extended family….what he wants most for is family at the moment is a tent so that they set up their own space and start to move forward again as a family.