Two of the more fragile Tamils had folded, I suppose you would say the word, to that pressure, and had moved into the transit centre.
Both of them were people who had mental health issues, maybe they weren't as apparent as first but they were quite considerable and were known to be people to be pretty fragile.
I'm not actually in the transit centre, no one is allowed in, not even the refugees who are stationed at the camp Lorengau are allowed in, only those who have moved there and stationed there.
What I am on at the moment is, I"m just in the town motel and I've stayed here before, and what usually happens, is the guys in the camp or in the transit centre come in and see me here.
So when I came here this time, I just happened to come here at a time of real crisis. Some of the refugees that are my friends stayed at the motel with me here and some of them are Tamils, Pakistani/Afghanis.
Some of the Tamils came and played to me on his phone a very distressed crying, sobbing out of control voice message from another Tamil who is staying in the transit centre and the other refugees friends wanted to make contact with him and so we resolved to try and go to the gate and persuade the people at the gate to go and get him, which we did and he more or less fell into the arms of his friend and he continued to sob uncontrollably.
The staff were a little bit loathe to hand him over to us but they did because we said, well there's no good staying there on his own, so we brought him back to the motel, and we did believe we would be able to handle him but as it turned out once he got back to the motel he was very paranoid, he was thinking everyone was going to kill him.
He told us this story that his other Tamil friend had cut himself, it turns out he had attempted suicide and there was blood all over him and that eventually someone came and took the man who had attempted suicide to the hospital, then he was calm for a little bit and we found out he hadn't eaten for about 4 days, at the same time the other Tamils had been sent video and pictures of him on the phone running naked through the town.
Once he was in our room and a bit settled, he was feeling a bit confident then all of a sudden he went berserk, he ran out, the others tried to follow him, he ran 3 kilometres, speedily, along the road and they had to follow in a car trying to collect him, I followed also in the car and we were able to get him into the motel, and then we spent the next 3 or 4 hours trying to get help for him and no one would help us.
We took him back to the gate of the transit centre and the people there told us they couldn't do anything, they weren't allowed to touch him or restrain him, there was nothing they could do and if he didn't want to walk up by himself, there was nothing they could do.
We tried to go to the hospital but he was very paranoid at the thought of going near the hospital, so we couldn't take him there. We went back again to the gates at the transit centre and again the people at the transit centre said look, we are sorry there's no psychiatric help on this hospital, there's no where you can take him, we can't do anything.
They were all helpful, they were trying to help us, they could see we were in trouble but it's either not in there job description or they are not allowed to or they are too scared to but none of them can help, and of course they are extremely worried and the others are worried here because they think this is going to happen to all of them because on the 31st of October, there are going to be no Australians there at all. So who is going to handle all these people with paranoia.
Somebody from the hospital told one of my friends that they had had three paranoid episodes within that week that there was another guy that his penis, and another person who had self-harmed, so there was three paranoia cases at the hospital.
When they were on the camp, anyone in the psychiatric state had people monitor them and watching them the whole time, here they don't have it, so here we were again with no help and we just didn't know what an earth we were going to do, so we came in and we did bring him back to our motel, and we calmed him down again and then for the next 3 or 4 hours, he moved in and out of his paranoid state. We kept him for that day and we had to sit up with him all night, and then the next morning when we had been up all night with him, we woke up to the news that the other guy who had attempted suicide in the transit centre had taken his own life, and the man who had committed suicide, he was taken to the hospital but no body watched him at the hospital and therefore he was able to commit suicide, so there's no on watching or monitoring, and yet 3 different people had this psychiatric episodes, so it's very traumatic to me. I have never had an experience of being so helpless.