Priest in PNG says doctors can help solve sorcery beliefs

Transcript

A missionary in the Papua New Guinea highlands says the medical profession can help police in spreading awareness about human disease, to counter sorcery beliefs.

Father Philip Gibbs is a New Zealand Catholic priest with Divine Word Missionaries, based in Mt Hagen, and has worked with remote villagers for decades.

Fr Gibbs spoke to Alex Perrottet.

PHILIP GIBBS: These ideas have been spreading out to other provinces, people move and they inter-marry and so on. And I think it's basically trying to answer fundamental questions about the problem of evil really. People die and why do people die? People in Western cultures might say 'well it was an accident or he got sick or something' and here people generally are not willing to accept the accident idea, they feel that there must be some reason behind an accident and traditionally they don't attribute much to germs and bacteria and viruses and so on. So normally thinking that there would be a human reason, black-magic or whatever you want to call it behind, especially the death of a young person.

AP: And you say you've been quite involved in these cases over the years.

PG: Yes, I've been involved in a number of cases. For instance a young man died in hospital, he was 30-years-old and people were questioning why and then they remembered that he had a bit of an altercation with an older woman a couple of days before so they concluded maybe that's the person that worked some sort of witchery on him. They didn't have a medical report from the hospital unfortunately. And so they accused her and they tortured her and asked her where she put his heart. The belief is that they take someone's heart out and they hide it somewhere in order to eat it later. So they tortured her and they tortured her very severely including putting red hot rods up inside her private parts. She was eight months pregnant, her child died at that moment and was born dead the next day. She was burnt over 30 percent of her body and managed to escape to another province. Talking to the men who did it later on, they said 'well we weren't really so concerned about torturing her, we were trying to save our brother's life. We thought that his body was still warm and that she had hidden his heart somewhere and so we were desperate to get his heart back so he didn't really die'. That's just an example of the sort of thing that goes on.

AP: What about medical professionals. I mean the example you just gave, perhaps doctors could have had more attention to what was going on or had contact with the family to explain to them why this man had died.

PG: Yes, that's one of the things we try to do with awareness now is to have people really ask the medical professionals for a medical report if possible and they'll read the medical report out at the funeral. I'm here in Chimbu at the moment and there was just one case last weekend, in a place in Chimbu, where two women were killed. We thought that it was finished here, there hadn't been a case for many many years, then it happened. And when the police went up to talk to the people they said 'oh we've freed ourselves from this terrible scourge of witches and sorcerers' and they seemed happy and pleased that they'd been able to kill these people. So even though we think we've made progress it seems that there's still a long way to go so we're working on it and I certainly don't give up, I think that it's something worth working for.