Gaston Matte, disabled children's centre advisor, Papua New Guinea
A CUSO volunteer alumnus makes an emotional journey back to the site of his overseas volunteer placement, almost two decades later.
Like thousands of other Canadian volunteers who have ventured beyond personal and geographic borders, Gaston Matte occasionally flips through the photo album from his overseas posting in Papua New Guinea, all those years ago.
Snapshots of another time reveal people he once knew, places he once walked. Following a return visit to Papua New Guinea after nearly two decades, Gaston can paste in new photos and new memories coloured with pride and hope.
In 1985, he and then-wife Suzanne Saunders landed in Mt. Hagen in western Papua New Guinea. A small gateway town ringed by sustenance farming, it links the coastal plains to the interior highlands of that South Pacific nation.
For the next two years, the Canadians would volunteer at the Mt. Hagen Handicapped Children’s Centre, operating out of a sparsely furnished room in the back of a small Baptist church.
Building a home for disabled children
In the mornings Gaston, who had managed a vocational program for developmentally challenged adults back in Canada, offered physiotherapy to the children, some severely handicapped from cerebral malaria.
After lunch he searched for badly needed funds to keep the centre operating, buy equipment, and build a permanent home for the children. Suzanne was a special education teacher/trainer.
“It was difficult at first,” Gaston says, “not because it was a hardship post – living conditions were ok – but because I felt I couldn’t do enough. We were trying to do so much with so little.”
Services for handicapped children were scarce in Papua New Guinea, and many kids with challenges could not attend school; at the time, ‘special’ education was unheard of. The Mt. Hagen’s Children’s Centre had been started by Leslie Edge, an Australian missionary who had a disabled child. Whenever Edge shopped at the local market, other women with handicapped children would make their way to her through the piles of produce, looking for help and advice.
The missionary set up the centre in 1984, and watched a dozen children, including infants, come through her door. But the Australian knew she needed support, and approached international agencies including CUSO, which had been placing teachers and teaching trainers in Papua New Guinea for years.
Gaston’s job was to build on what Leslie Edge and her local staff had started, and he hunted for money both within Papua New Guinea and internationally. Suzanne was to develop an elementary curriculum for hearing impaired children.
At one point, Gaston thought about heading home, frustrated by the slow progress. But he ended up staying an extra year, and over the three years of his placement he helped raise US$500,000 to build a new centre, purchase vehicles to transport the kids, buy physio equipment, and hire Papua New Guinean teachers to be trained to take over from the foreign volunteers.
When Gaston left in 1988 – with one-year-old daughter Kayla and adopted Papua New Guinean baby brother Logan in tow – there were 25 children being helped by a staff of three Papua New Guinean teachers and three international volunteers hailing from Canada, the UK and Germany, all housed in brand new staff buildings. The new centre and houses were surrounded by dirt, so we planted trees and gardens, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever make it back to see if they’d grown.”
A returned volunteer journeys back
Almost two decades later, Gaston – who lives in Ottawa and works in CUSO-VSO’s fundraising department – journeyed back to Mt. Hagen for the first time. He half-expected the centre’s doors to be locked, having heard it was closed for a few years, cut off by international funders due to mismanagement. Not many Canadian volunteers get to go back again, and when they do, they are sometimes disappointed. Development doesn’t happen overnight, but is measured in generations.
Gaston didn’t know if the literal and figurative seeds he helped plant had taken root. But there, still echoing with the sounds of children, sat the building framed by full-grown trees and lush vegetation.
The centre is currently run by the Catholic Dioceses of Papua New Guinea and the Callan Services for Disabled Persons, an agency set up in 1991 by the Papua New Guinea Congregation of Christian Brothers. Now known as the Callan Centre, so named for the Irish town where the founder of the Christian Brothers was raised, the operation receives money from local sources and Christian Blind Mission International of Germany.
Visiting Papua New Guinea again was an emotional experience for Gaston, who rode waves of nostalgia, happiness and concern – funding for the centre is still precarious. And he couldn’t help but feel pride when Mary Wannis and Don Waipe, Papua New Guinean teachers hired during his placement who were still working in Mt. Hagen, affectionately called him “Papa Centre.”
Now back home, new photos of Mary and Don, and the children who face a better future because of all the teachers at the centre, have now been added to the pages of Gaston Matte’s memory.
