Gaston Matte, a Canadian volunteer with CUSO, returns to the children's center he helped establish in Mt. Hagen, Papua New Guinea 16 years prior. When he arrives, he finds that the center is still operating and has expanded its services, helping more children and integrating some into local schools. During his initial placement from 1985 to 1988, Gaston helped raise funds to build a new permanent center and train local teachers to continue the work. Though funding remains precarious, the center has grown trees and gardens around the building and continues serving the community. Gaston feels pride that the seeds he helped plant have taken root and produced positive impact.

1. Snapshots of Hope
By Sean Kelly
A CUSO cooperant makes an emotional journey back to the site of his overseas volunteer
placement, 16 years later.
ike thousands of other Canadian volunteers who have ventured beyond borders,
Gaston Matte occasionally flips through the photo album from his overseas posting
in Papua New Guinea, all those years ago.
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Snapshots of another time reveal people he once knew, places he once walked. Now,
following a return visit to PNG after 16 years, Gaston can paste in new photos and new
memories coloured with pride and hope.
In 1985, Gaston 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.
They had been sent by CUSO, a non-profit Canadian organization that has placed over
13,000 volunteers abroad since 1961. 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,” says Gaston, “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 PNG, 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 Leslie 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 Leslie knew she needed support, and approached
international agencies including CUSO, which had been placing teachers and teaching
trainers in PNG for years. Gaston’s job was to build on what Leslie and her local staff

2. 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, including staff housing, purchase vehicles to transport
the kids, buy physiotherapy 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 PNG baby
brother Logan in hand – there were 25 children being helped by a staff of three PNG
teachers and three international volunteers hailing from Canada, the UK and Germany, all
housed in a brand new building. “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.”
This past October, the 52-year-old Gaston – who lives in Ottawa and works in CUSO’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 PNG and the Callan Services for
Disabled Persons, an agency set up in 1991 by the Congregation of Christian Brothers
(PNG). Now known as the Callan Centre, so named for the Irish town where the founder
of the Christian Brothers was raised, Gaston’s centre receives money from local sources
and Christian Blind Mission International of Germany. Gaston also learned that hearing-
impaired children have been integrated into the regular classrooms of elementary schools
– the first class of deaf kids will graduate this year.
Visiting Papua New Guinea after a decade-and-a-half 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,
PNG teachers hired during his placement who were still working in Mr. 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’s
memory.
Gaston Matte lives in Ottawa, and has been working as staff with CUSO for 12 years.