Up and close and personal with Sully Paea

Voluntary youth worker Sully Paea has helped Otara children for 25 years. Picture / Paul Estcourt

Somebody, some drunk probably, drove a four-wheel-drive at the door frame of the drop-in centre recently. Sully Paea points this out, laughing. The frame is bowed and battered. It is hung with Christmas decorations and the effect is quite incongruous.

But it makes a reasonable enough metaphor for the centre, and for Paea, the youth worker. They, like Christmas, represent a sort of triumph of hope over experience.

If the Otara centre is a beacon of hope in a community - and it is supposed to be - you come here and you think that its light shines valiantly, if dimly. About a month ago the centre was trashed by some of the kids who have been coming here since they were little. The scars are barely healed. The holes in the walls have been patched, the carpet still has paint splatters, the pool table is ripped.

"Oh, it's been in the wars," says Paea, a little stocky fellow with a magnificent, bristling moustache. This is the only thing about him that is at all prickly. You ask about hope over experience and he shakes his head and says, "It was our kids! They grew up here. At first I was really angry. I felt like grabbing hold of those kids and bashing their heads together."

He still can't believe it, you can hear that in his voice. But he is giggling because, what else can you do? Nobody has been able to get any answers out of the kids, about six of them, aged between eight and 13. "I mean I'd like some answers myself. Because I thought I had all the answers after years of working with children and young people. But this one?"

He's been finding ways for 25 years and "Ha, I'm running out of ideas. I think I have to go back to what I used to do and that is spend a little more time on a one-on-one because that's what a lot of these kids need the most. They don't have that connection. If you could follow these kids, you'd find that somewhere along the way there's a missing connection. There's something that's missing there."

So you sit here, on a very old couch while Paea balances on a plastic crate because there aren't enough chairs, and look around. This place, like the other drop-in centres around Otara Paea's involved in, was "built from junk". You can tell that. There's the beat-up pool table, a ping-pong table on wonky legs, a rudimentary kitchen. There are some books: a guide to breast-feeding, a few tatty kids' books, a manual on community safety and, ha indeed, crime prevention. They have activities here for those who don't have anything else to do.

Paea says, "I think what it is, one of the things I've seen, is everybody's busy working and sometimes the kids get left out. They don't have a close relationship with their parents. So they just basically grow up in the street. They have to fetch for themselves sometimes."

And then somebody gives them a place to come in off the street, gives them things to do, feeds them, and ... they trash the place? I'm sitting here, spluttering about this, which simply makes Paea laugh harder.

He can see the irony in the only possible explanation: they did it for something to do. In the place which exists to give them something to do. The rotten kids didn't show any remorse either. "Well, they don't show any because they don't know what remorse means." He explains this very patiently.

He knows what it's like to be bored. He was bored silly until he got to his 20s and found out a couple of things. He was a bad kid who went good. A kid who was bottom of every class at school, on Niue where he grew up, and who thought he was thick when he is obviously clever.

He did drink and drugs and gangs. He didn't know his father until the children of his father's second family saw a picture of him in the Herald. That was in the 80s. His mother had married again and he has a collection of half-siblings. He spent much of his early years looking after them. He was given to a relative to raise and that turned out to be no good.

"I went through the abuse, the physical abuse, the mental abuse and all kinds of abuse that comes on top of that."

Growing up, "I was the odd one out. I wasn't connecting to that family simply because I was the odd one out. I was creative. I didn't know it at the time. I was always bored." He wanted to make things but the only outlet for his creativity was destructive, he says. He thought that making a slingshot and shooting things "was creative. I felt like I'd accomplished something."

Having a past like his, he says, "that'll help. That's my only qualification, actually."

That and his eternally optimistic nature. "You've got to look at the good things in people. And not only that, but somebody saw the goodness in me because I was a ratbag too." He says of those ratbags who trashed the place that, "I guarantee that if you sat those kids down here now and talked to them, you'll see the real characters, the real kids. I think what I'm doing now is what I wanted someone to do to me when I was growing up."

What he is doing now, and has been since he started taking care of kids, he agrees, is creating a family for himself - one where he won't be the odd one out. Which must make it all the more heart-breaking. "Oh yeah, lots of times I get disheartened but, man, I did it. I did it to someone else. I just thought to myself, 'Well, that's how someone else felt when I stole off them."

Still, I say, he may have paid his dues. "Ha, well, if I was to look at that side of things, I'd have quit a long time ago."

This is not for want of trying. "About three years ago I told my family we're going to sell the house, move on, we've done our bit. A couple of weeks after that Mucking In came and did my house up." The community had nominated him - "You know, my place was quite a mess, because most of our time is community." This, I suggest, was a good ploy on the part of the neighbourhood to get him to stay. "Oh yeah, man, that was a divine appointment that one."

He believes in divine intervention; in being blessed. Another irony. There's not much point in talking to the kids about God because, "For instance, if I tell them about God as a father, well, they don't understand that because they don't have a father. They don't know what a father is.

"And for some the father is the one that beats them and kicks them." But they do have Paea and, "I'm a father and I'm still married".

God moves in mysterious ways. Every time things get really bad, or Paea is about to give up, something good happens, he says. Someone gave him a Harley-Davidson. "I've always wanted one. I couldn't afford one in a million years."

I ask who pays his wages and he laughs so hard he almost falls off the plastic crate. "Ha ha ha. Who pays my wages? Good question. I ask that question myself. My wife gets paid [as a teacher in an alternative education scheme]. I get drip-fed from wherever."

To his vast amusement, some people think he does this work because he's rich. He does it because he loves it, and he loves those kids.

And because he's a Christian, one who is scathing about the churches because God doesn't live in churches and "They sit there doing nothing".

But even eternal optimists get fed up. "You know, at times I just feel like I don't have anything, any answers at all ... But I still have a lot of love to give them. That's all I've got."