After three weeks living at her new apartment at Charford Court in Port-of-Spain, amputee Erica Joseph says she is not satisfied with the conditions of her home.
Joseph, 57, and her husband Wendell, 64, a former boxer, were given their seventh Housing Development Corporation apartment after living on Brian Lara Promenade and Queen’s Park Savannah and for the past two years.
In early November, Joseph said she was happy after she received the keys to her new home.
However, in an interview yesterday, Joseph said at the time she received the apartment she did not want to complain.
“They just dump me here and have me dragging. They call the media and say they working and when the media gone they pack up the tools and say here not fit for wheelchair and gone,” she said.
She said since she moved in all her belongings are still packed away.
“The problem is you can’t put away the place...I can’t go to the bathroom,” she said.
Joseph said she has to bathe by the wash-tub because there is no space for the wheelchair inside the bathroom.
She said she was willing to pay for a bigger place for her own convenience.
“I bouncing up with the wheelchair wall to wall. The workers said the place was not for wheelchair. It has no room. Even the doctor complained it has no room for kitchen. Where the kitchen?” she asked.
She complained that at times her husband had to fetch water from the hospital to bathe.
Joseph cried and said she felt she was at wit’s end.
“Why they doing we this all the time. What I go do now? Look at the trouble I in. I can’t eat and my husband has to go far to get water to bathe. Why they dump me here? They go say I don’t want no place. It is the worse,” she said.
She said she did not want to inconvenience anyone outside of the apartment so she did not open the windows.
“I have to depend on the fan for breeze. You can’t open the window because people liming there. You have to keep the window close,” she said.
The Josephs claimed gunmen chased them away from their last HDC home at Tarodale, San Fernando, in 2015.