Benjamin Osei sits alone on a plastic chair in a small community-centre basement. He's wearing a loose, black and white African-style patterned top and clutching a textbook. A group of a dozen black teenagers walks in, announcing their arrival with a symphony of laughter and traded insults.
"Your head is shaped like a football," one says.
"How can you talk? You wear the same pants every day," comes the reply.
"Shut up. I told you, these are my school pants."
Aged between 13 and 17, they live in the large apartment towers of the Palisades complex on San Romanoway. The teens come to these sessions two evenings a week after school. It's a program designed to steer the young people of the Jane and Finch neighbourhood away from gangs and toward academic success.
Mr. Osei, 47, waits for them to quiet down. Everybody sits. At the boys' request, tonight they'll be talking about sex.
They disagree on when a young man should become sexually active. Some say at 13, others say only when he's prepared to accept the consequences, such as having a child.
Mr. Osei allows the boisterous conversation to flow, and then offers some examples from their neighbourhood. A lot of young, single mothers live in these towers, he says. Don't they, as young men, have a responsibility to offer a more stable family structure?
The teens, many of whom come from single-parent families, are divided.
"Man, when you're our age, you just want to grease. It's natural," one says. "And isn't it just as much the woman's responsibility? Why do we have it all on us?"
Mr. Osei starts to tell a story about his life in Africa. It's clearly a story with a moral, but before it's even begun the teens are shouting in protest. They've heard this one before.
After, he smiles at the memory. "They fool around. But at least when I repeat myself they say 'You've said that before!' So they're listening."
Mr. Osei came to Toronto in late 1999, the year a three-year-old girl was shot and killed in a crossfire near Jane and Finch. The media's eyes were fixed on the intersection. Mr. Osei, who had already suffered a great tragedy in his life, felt drawn to the area.
In 1991, Mr. Osei was living in Sierra Leone when civil war took hold. It was a vicious conflict fought in large part by militias of child soldiers.
Shortly after Christmas of 1992, his wife and children were travelling through a rural area when their bus was ambushed by rebels. Mr. Osei's wife, children and everyone else on board were slaughtered.
On hearing the news, Mr. Osei went to the area where they were killed. He was captured by the rebels and held for nearly a year.
When government forces finally overran the camp in 1993, he was interrogated and tortured. He was accused of collaboration. Only intervention by a sympathetic officer saved him from execution.
He was allowed to return to his native Ghana, where he met and married his current wife, Monica. In 1996, he earned a scholarship to Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., and graduated with a master of divinity.
Much of his research was on the role of marginalized youth in Sierra Leone's civil war.
"What I realized is that it was the marginalized children that were responsible for most of the atrocities," Mr. Osei said.
When he arrived at Jane and Finch, Mr. Osei brought a determination to work with disaffected youth. He took his résumé to local churches, but his degree wasn't enough to get him a job. He worked in factories to pay the rent, and at night he'd ride his bicycle around the neighbourhood to meet the local youths.
The boys were mainly interested in basketball, so he would talk to them while they played. On hot summer nights, he handed out bottles of water. Although he knew nothing about the sport, he organized teams, entered leagues and became the coach and chaperone for dozens of teenagers.
That was how he met Lefty, 15, one of the teens in the discussion group. Lefty and his friends come to these discussion groups, and they get a meal at the end.
