By Josue Garcia | Boy with a Ball Staff
When you come face-to-face with the young 15 year old man I am going to describe, the first thing you'll think is... "this guy is going to rob me." He walks with his gel-filled hair 10 centimeters from his head, his pants to the middle of his butt showing off his Mickey Mouse boxers and amateur tattoos, his pants dirty and sandals falling apart.
We have invited him on several occasions to our activities and he is almost always expelled from the soccer matches, theater groups and tutoring sessions. When he gets removed, he often throws the balls over fences so that the games cannot continue or when he is called out on something, he usually responds with long strings of vulgar words.
It's hard to imagine that the day following one of these expulsions, when my partner Kim gave him a small piece of candy during a community walk through and I invited him to help me in a job I had, the first thing he had to say was:
"Mr. Josue, excuse me for my bad behavior yesterday, but I'm going through a really tough time right now."
Those are the moments when we realize that it is worth being close to them. You can see this photo, he is being taught how to do a job and he is doing it with a lot of pride.
If each human being in this world dedicated time to all these boys in social risk, there is no doubt our humanity would be different. This is what Boy with a Ball is all about.
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