Jane-Finch neighbourhood

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.

"Benjamin's fun, and he appreciates us," Lefty says. "He teaches us life lessons. Right from wrong. It's usually stuff my mom would say to me, but it's different coming from him."

Mark Berko, 21, grew up in Jane and Finch and has returned to the area after a couple of years away at college. Part of his internship is spent helping Mr. Osei.

"He has patience. Big time," Mr. Berko says. "He'll make time for the kids and their events. And I don't think it's because he's got time on his hands. He always says it's the people that have to change this community, and that's what he's doing."

Mr. Osei was at first surprised by the anger he found among the young black men he worked with. They told him that racism was all around them, at school, at work and from the police. It was holding them back. But this is such a rich country, he thought.

One day, Mr. Osei was stopped and searched by police while riding his bicycle. A black man in a yellow T-shirt was suspected of stealing a laptop, they said. Mr. Osei was wearing a yellow T-shirt. He was held for what felt like an hour as traffic crawled past, every neck craned in his direction.

It was humiliating.

At the time, he was earning $300 a week assembling television stands. It was just enough to pay his rent and send some money back to his wife and two children in Ghana. But after he was nearly crushed by a pile of falling wood at work, he decided he wasn't going to spend his life in a factory.

He focused on turning his volunteer work into a career. He raised funds from churches and community organizations to continue his work with young people. It was barely enough to live on but he gave up the factory job.

Then, in 2004, as he was earning praise from civic leaders and other community workers, the government of Canada told him to leave.

Mr. Osei says he received bad advice when he applied for refugee status. He had gone home to Ghana years earlier, but left when old enemies threatened his life. Canadian immigration officials decided that a change in government in Ghana made it safe for him to go back. Many intervened on his behalf, including Mayor David Miller, citing the work he was doing at Jane and Finch. But the government held firm.

He was sent back to Ghana, which allowed him to reunite with his wife and son, and meet his daughter (she was born while he was in Toronto). But he thought of Jane and Finch and the youths who had come to count on him.

When he returned to Canada nearly a year later, after successfully applying to become a landed immigrant, one of the teens he worked closely with had been charged with holding up a Tim Hortons. That young man is now serving a four-year prison term for armed robbery in Kingston.

A few months ago, Mr. Osei started to complain of a pain in his leg. He thought it was nothing, but colleagues nagged him until he went to a doctor. It turned out to be a cancerous tumour.

He's worn out, he says. The radiation treatments are taxing, and the youths are always a source of stress.

"I have to walk with confidence. That's what they tell me," he says.

On the inside of his left thigh, he traces the shape of a small pear, about seven centimetres long and four centimetres across at the bottom. This is the approximate size of the tumour his doctors have told him they will remove.

"I don't have time to fall sick," he says. "I hope for the best."

He worries that a prolonged absence might hurt the teens he works with.

"I know they want attention. They need a place to belong," Mr. Osei said. "They are the unwanted tribes. We know they are there but we don't want to have anything to do with them."

Mr. Osei underwent a six-hour operation and was released from hospital this week. He is recovering at home.

About the series

The intersection of Jane Street and Finch Avenue in northwest Toronto draws reporters all too often for stories of guns and violence, but less is told about ordinary life here. To the dismay of residents, "Jane-Finch" has become a catch-all phrase that suggests poverty, gangs and racial division. Those who live here say the stereotypes obscure a complex, resilient community struggling to emerge from years of neglect. To understand the neighbourhood behind the name, The Globe and Mail's Joe Friesen will report regularly from Jane and Finch. This is his first instalment.