Boy With a Ball

Can You Help Us Get School Supplies to Children in Costa Rica?

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:49:00 +0000

An Urgent Need & An Amazing Opportunity For You To Help Children Get the School Supplies They Need

It is February and February is the time in which families in Costa Rica head out to buy the $100 of school supplies each of their children need in order to continue going to school. Stores fill the newspapers with ads about special deals on what the students need. It is an exciting time for a country that has fought very hard to help their people be educated.

February is a little different if you are a young person living in a precario or squatter's settlement like the El Triangulo de la Solidaridad neighborhood we work in. With the average income per household being around $200 in the precario, most families can barely afford one child's $100 of school supplies and that is only if things are going well for their family.

It is easy to see why the average precario resident has only made it through the 3rd grade. It only takes one tough February economically where $100 might as well be $1 million and the boy or girl is forced to drop out of school, surrendering any chance of a life outside of poverty one day.

Fifty Young Peoples Lives Are Changed in the Precario

In 2007, our team began helping about nine families purchase the school supplies they needed. It was life-changing for them but, surprisingly, it was life-altering for us as well. Family members wept as we walked into hand them the supplies they needed.

In 2008, we went ahead and set aside $1000 to help 10 families get school supplies. We sent out an email to all of you and you responded by either donating $ or supplies. Your response was overwhelming. As a result, over fifty students received school supplies. The precario was dramatically impacted.

Over the course of the year, we took the program further. We opened tutoring centers in the precario (see photo above) where the students could also receive the tutoring support they would need to be able to do well in school. It isn't enough to help kids get into school. We have to help them do well once they get there. These tutoring centers have been a powerful tool, providing upper class private school students with the life changing opportunity to come and volunteer the tutoring that is dramatically helping the children from the precario.

This is a gift that keeps on giving.

How You Can Help A Child Have A Chance At A Future

So here we are in February again. Families are filling out request forms that we have designed where they are agreeing to report their child's grades each report card so we can track their progress and provide support for those who might struggle. We have just started collecting the lists and have already received 34 back with 59 in total having been requested.

I want to invite you into an amazing opportunity to help these young people and their families. If you can and if you are interested, please click on the link below to go to our website at www.boywithaball.com and make an online donation. You can also send in a check to our office at P.O. Box 14387, San Antonio, TX, 78214-4387. Your gift will help us to be combined with those who have brought down school supplies to fill these lists and help these students have the opportunity to stay in school.

Click Here to Go to Boy With a Ball's Online Donation Page to Make a Donation to Help These Students

One Final Exciting Update

A dream is coming true for the Boy With a Ball/FUNDADEJO team in Costa Rica as Auburn University's graduate design program has taken on the project of designing and coming to Costa Rica to build us a community/tutoring center for us in the precario. The group is currently raising funds for the project with our staff to design the building. To find out more, click on the tutoring center box below.

(Click here to enter the site and learn more about the center!)

Thank you so much for your ongoing investment in our work to reach and equip young people. It is great to work with you as we walk into seeing these young lives changed.

Jamie Johnson

Executive Director
boywithaball@gmail.com
www.boywithaball.com
210-858-5812

Facing a Threat

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Boy With a Ball/FUNDADEJO in San Jose, Costa Rica continues to work in a squatter’s settlement or “precario” located just north of downtown San Jose called “El Triangulo de la Solidaridad.” The precario has a population of around 2,500 people, mostly Nicaraguan immigrants, living on just three acres of land. Their quality of life is third world.

Many Costa Ricans are afraid to go into a precario because these areas are dramatically impoverished and crime-ridden however our experience has been that this precario is a humble village full of families and individuals looking for a better life than what they had back in Nicaragua. Nicaragua’s average annual salary per person is $600. Costa Rica’s is $6,000.

One great threat to the precario as long as we have been there is the continual presence of a small group of drug dealers who usually hang out in the front of the community. This group has changed over the years with new guys flowing in and some of the older guys disappearing but there are always at least one or two of them there each day as we walk in to talk to families, lead groups or facilitate activities.

Recently, however, something had changed. The group of drug dealers was growing and, as a result, the precario was changing. Young guys we had been reaching began distancing themselves from us and gravitating toward the dealers. Our credibility weakened and the group of drug dealers and their cohorts grew from the usual two to five guys to a group of between 10 – 20.

Something had to be done.

Confronting the Drug Dealers

In October of last year, our teams arrived for a Saturday morning walkthrough and were greeted by the dealers yet again so we took action. Two of our leaders walked up to the two main dealers and confronted them. “We know what you are doing in this community,” we said. “We know that you are drawing young people into drugs and we aren’t going to let you do it anymore.” We went on to talk to them about their futures and to tell them we could help them get back into school or to find real jobs. It was a dramatic moment and many in the community stopped to watch. The dealers were nervous and mostly just laughed uncomfortably .

Then we walked away.

The Drug Dealers Strike Back

It was just a few days later that a call came into the office. The guy who was distributing drugs to these dealers had ordered them to “shank” or stab me and one of our leaders from right there in the precario. They believed we were going to call the police and have them arrested. Things got a little tense for a few days.

In our next visit to the precario we walked up to them, shook their hands and made it clear that we weren’t leaving. Instead we actually went out of our way to get a group of our male leaders to play basketball right next to the dealers each week as a way of showing the community that the dealers had no power. We were not scared and we weren’t going to go away.

We found out later that the community had confronted the dealers and told them that the community would go after them if anything happened to any of us. We were a good part of the community in their eyes and they protected us.

A Few Days Ago…a Breakthrough

This past Saturday as we walked into the precario for the first time in several weeks, we came upon the dealers as they sat in the middle of the precario smoking marijuana right next to several of the families homes who are leaders for us. We went directly over to sit with them.

As we sat down they began to mock us by saying, “Hey, we are smoking marijuana.” We began to talk to them about how marijuana can keep them from their dreams, how it will take away their motivation to do the things they need to do like finding real jobs or studying and how it is a gateway drug for even more damaging drugs like crack cocaine.

We spoke about how it also becomes a crutch to use when they face stress rather than allowing them to learn how to manage stress productively with faith, hope and love in a way that could make them good men, spouses or fathers one day. What felt good for the moment was destroying their futures.

One of the main guys was hooked on our words. His eyes locked on to mine and it was obvious that his heart was open. We told the two guys that we aren’t against them. Our team is dedicated to helping young people do well…to grow…to reach their dreams. We told them we could help them if they were open. We could eat lunch together and talk about getting back in school.

The guy reached over and shook my hand and said he would like that. Finally, a breakthrough.

Boy With a Ball Exists to Reach Young People, Equip Them as Leaders and Transform Communities

We thank God for this turn of events and also for your willingness to walk with us as friends as we develop teams capable of doing this very grassroots work in neighborhoods across the world. It is good work and work that very much needs to be done.

It is so very easy to talk of wanting to make a difference and yet so very much harder to do the actual tedious, constant, unglamorous work required to actually change things. Your financial support, your prayers and your friendship are truly making a difference in helping us to see young lives changed and then equipped to turn and help change others.

It is our very strong belief that this is the best way to change the world…one young person and one family at a time.

Your friend,

Jamie Johnson

What A Great Year!

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:43:00 +0000

I hope this finds you enjoying a refreshing and restful holiday season filled with celebration of a great 2008 and expectation for 2009. I can not think of a bigger year in the history of Boy With a Ball and we are very thankful for your friendship and support of our work to reach and equip young people.

Here are a few glimpses at what all has gone on this year:

-We have expanded our work in Costa Rica this year to the point of seeing a Costa Rican team emerge that is led and composed of Costa Ricans.
-We have relaunched Chris & Kelli Mora into their work in helping young people on the Southside of San Antonio after bringing them to Costa Rica for a time of intensive training.
-We have formed a global team that will work to help launch new Boy With a Ball teams in new countries while continuing to provide support for preexisting teams.
-We have been given the privilege of running six new Camp of Champions for Lincoln International School in San Jose, Costa Rica which allows us to help form and equip the future leaders of that country.
-We launched our great new website at www.boywithaball.com.
-We expanded our work in the precario or squatter's settlement in San Jose, Costa Rica including launching a Leader's Group that we hope will produce indigenous leaders who will be able to turn and lead this work within their neighborhood.
-We began corporate partnerships with the Intel Corporation and Pequeno Mundo (a large Costa Rican retailer) that are providing exciting possibilities for this next year.
-We are working with Auburn University's graduate design program to build a new building in the precario that will be used for housing much of our work there.
-We helped over 50 children in the precario get all of the school supplies they needed to get into school and then launched a tutoring center in the precario with the help of Lincoln School students that is helping around 30 children to stay in school.
-We had four international interns come to work with our Costa Rican team. Thanks Jillian, Kevin, Alice & Christine!
-We expanded our staff including adding Melody Strom as our Development Director in the office and Josue Garcia as a Program Director in Costa Rica. (For the record, Melody has a web camera...sorry inside joke.)
-We traveled to Washington D.C. as a staff for important meetings with USAID and others there.

Walking Together into Making Change

Our vision continues to be building teams in cities across the world that can reach and equip young people and their families to turn and help others. These past two years have been an amazing opportunity to turn what once was a far-fetched vision into a growing reality.

While having a great vision, strong board of directors, talented staff and dedicated volunteers all play a huge part in this work, we have come to realize that our greatest asset in this fight are those of you who are reading this right now. Without friends and supporters of our work, Boy With a Ball would transition from a thriving reality into being a failed vision. We are thankful for your committment to us and excited by what we have been able to accomplish together.

And Now For Some Important & Moving News

After six years of amazing work, Cindy Chen is stepping down as our Boy With a Ball's Global Office Administrator and stepping up to be a mom. I want to personally recognize Cindy for her sacrificial service and for the grace and excellence with which she has functioned as a part of the Boy With a Ball team these last years. Thank you, Cindy and Sam!

With this change, we are transitioning Boy With a Ball's U.S. office presence to San Antonio, Texas and ask for each of you to note this. Kelli Mora will be stepping into Cindy's position and this is our new mailing address:

Boy With a Ball
P.O. Box 14387
San Antonio, TX 78214-4387

Additionally, our new office number is 210-858-5812.

Again, thank you for your help this year and we look forward for an exciting year together in 2009.

Jamie

A Vision for Changing the World One Neighborhood, Family & Young Person At A Time

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:50:00 +0000

The Hope of Development

I hope you have had a great Christmas and that this finds your heart full of hope for the coming year.

One of the inherent messages that runs through the Christmas and even New Year’s holidays is the necessity and promise of change. To go a step farther, the two holidays fill most of our hearts with the hope of positive change. Whether we focus on the birth of a Messiah who comes to deliver us from our weaknesses and pain or the birth of a brand new year with 365 days of brand new opportunities, we are touching the idea that things are going to change…and for the better.

The idea of positive change for me is wrapped up in the word “development.” Our modern English word “development” comes from an old English world “desveloper” with the prefix des meaning “undo” and the veloper part of the word meaning “wrap up.” When you combine the two meanings, the old word suggested the idea of “unrolling” or “unfolding.” The word “development” has come to mean the act or process of developing, growth or progress.

What I most like about the idea of development and this concept of growth is that it indicates hunger for change and a willingness to admit that things can and need to get better. I find this concept of positive change attractive because so much of what we see around us is not attractive at all. From my perspective, we do need things to change and grow.

A World That Needs Development

We live in a world that is full of promise, potential and beauty. It is however imperfect and is infected with significant threats, most of which proceed out of simple human selfishness. Everything that has life in it grows. In a positive environment, things grow into what they were made to be. In toxic or negative environments, things grow in malformed or unhealthy ways. They grow into being damaged.

Young people today are growing up in communities that are a mix of both positive and negative ingredients. While there is so much good in the world, the majority of young people are growing up receiving less than they need in order to be developed into healthy adults. There are no perfect families in perfect communities producing perfect young people with thriving hearts and lives. Sadly, more and more families and communities are damaged and therefore produce underdeveloped or damaged young people. Damaged young people grow into being damaged adults who become damaged/damaging parents and community members. Those who grow up without receiving all that they were made to receive grow with a hole in their heart that causes them pain. Their pursuit of filling that hole and ending that pain many times drives them to use, consume and abuse others. They become negative youth developers.

The world is full today of negative youth developers - damaged parents & communities, drug addicts and dealers, gang leaders and members, seductive teenagers wooing insecure other teenagers into high risk behavior, pedophiles, greedy marketers, negative media sources, pimps, negligent caregivers, child abusers and on and on and on and on. Every corner in every neighborhood of every city across the globe reflects this reality even as you read these words. Sadly, their existence ensures a damaged next generation that will go on to do even more damage. Things are going to get worse unless we do something today.

On the other hand, imagine if we could twist the situation. Imagine if damage could give way to development.

Imagine if our cities were teeming with well-developed young people coming out of loving, healthy families. The socio-economic impact would change our communities and world on levels that we cannot even fully grasp. Young people with full hearts, educated minds and active hands and feet would walk out into forming healthy families, healthy neighborhoods and healthy communities. They would become amazing employees that would together build world-changing companies, governments and employers. They would turn compassionately to reach out and extend their hands to those hurting within their communities. As a result, poverty would be dramatically lessened and the cycle of damage creating damage would be replaced by health producing health. This is the vision of development that has to drive us. Certainly, we will never see this happen on such storybook levels as in the words above, however, the more we fight towards that end, the better things will be.

So How Do We Do It & What Do We Do?

A beautiful dream or vision that cannot be realized is, quite honestly, a nightmare. No one likes to be teased. Development, though, is not a pie in the sky painting of an unreachable reality. It is an very possible process of growth that can be engaged today.

The word “development” first requires us to admit that we are not where we can be. This is easy to nod our heads to but harder to walk out. Governments must admit that they are doing things wrong. Elected officials must acknowledge ignorance which requires risking vulnerability. Fathers & mothers have to face their fears that they are not perfect fathers and mothers. Pastors and priests, social workers and social scientists all have to admit that they do not know yet as much as they will need to know to walk forward. Each of us has to open our hands and let go of the truths that have brought us this far in order to grasp onto the truths we will need for tomorrow. Humility must replace insecurity and pride.

The process of development then asks us to do an even more difficult thing which is to work hard, open our hearts and look for the real answers required to bring about real and lasting development. We cannot be lazy and we cannot settle for quick, shallow answers that win funding or impress voters. We must look for answers that produce results.

I would ruin this piece if I were to try to end this with some kind of detailed prescription for all that this process will take. I do not have these answers in their entirety. No one does. This process will require collaboration and a process of discovery. I will, however, go so far as to give some things that do appear to be parts of the equation.

We will need to learn and turn to develop young people if we are to develop our communities. Young people are malleable and can be developed more easily. Just as a child can learn new languages faster than an adult, so can they learn new behaviors more quickly and more profoundly. This is not to say that we cannot or should not develop older individuals but just that developing people when they are young is and always will be the best time to develop them.

We will need to learn from those who are currently being successful at developing young people. This will certainly be controversial but we will need to stop trying to develop young people from an institutional, programmatic approach and transition into a relational, community based approach. Gangs, dealers and extremist groups get this. We must get it more deeply than they do and replace them.

Recently, I asked for a meeting with a drug dealer in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica. I told him that I led a non-profit organization that worked with young people and that I needed his help. He was an expert at reaching young people in San Jose while I was a novice, in comparison. I wanted him to talk to me and teach me so that I could help them and I told him that maybe I could even help him in the process. He sat down on a bench in front of Costa Rica’s National Theater and spilled out his techniques. He told me that on weekends in downtown Costa Rica, his group would fill a hotel room with massive quantities of drugs and then invite the street kids in for a weekend of free drugs. At the end of the weekend, the street kids would walk out of the hotel rooms as addicts and soldiers who would then go out and work for the dealers, selling drugs for them in order to feed their own newfound habits.

I hope this story scares you as much as it did me. It also shows you why sitting and waiting at a youth center will never match what these dealers and other predatorial groups like them can accomplish as they GO TO the young people rather than waiting for the young people to COME TO them. We must develop teams that can go and work in neighborhoods rather than sitting in our offices and expecting young people to come to us.

We must build developmental gardens in every neighborhood of every city of the world. Young people are a product of the relationships they experience over the course of their lives. Good, healthy relationships produce healthy young adults. Negative, unhealthy relationships produce unhealthy young adults. A young person who grows up with two loving parents in a healthy, caring family that includes supportive siblings and extended family in the midst of caring and relational neighborhoods, school and community environments will grow up to thrive.

Unfortunately, it is only a very, very small percentage of young people in today’s world that will grow up in such an idyllic situation. Our fight in the midst of a broken world full of broken relationships and broken people will be fighting to do everything that we can to improve the relational gardens that young people grow up in.

Providing neighborhood classes on parenting as well as providing mentoring, tutoring and even sending in outreach teams that can connect and build positive relationships with young people and families in every neighborhood of every city across the globe is a first step in beginning to rebuild the relational gardens that young people are growing up in. We can no longer let the drug dealers stand on our corners and sit in our parks without having individuals capable of building positive development relationships there as well. It is humorous but true that it may be that the first people we should be developing are the dealers on the corner. By doing so, we eliminate them as a threat while also possibly equipping them to join us in the fight to create positive development.

I will stop here and look forward to your responses. In reality, we face a battle between self-interest, ignorance and apathy on one side and care, compassion and health on the other. You yourself will have to decide which of these will motivate you and on which side you line up. I hope that we get to fight together to walk out these words and many more that will proceed out of this conversation.

How The Ball Rolls...

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:37:00 +0000

I have said quite a few times over the past six months that I believe that August 2008 to about February 2009 are a crucial time period for Boy With a Ball. I don't even know that I can quantify why in any kind of coherent way. It just seems like so much of what we have dreamed of prior to this is culminating in this moment for the organization and that so much of what is happening is laying a foundation for our dreams for tomorrow.

Boy With a Ball exists to develop young people. Young people across the world are pliable and waiting to be developed. Sadly, the predators and parasites of the world are the ones who are doing 90% of the developing of young people. Big charities like Big Brothers/Big Sisters send a suit-wearing businessman into a barrio or neighborhood for an hour once a week and then congratulate themselves while the drug dealers, gang leaders, pimps, pedophiles, bad parents and deviants hang out in every neighborhood of every city all day, all week, all year long.

Boy With a Ball exists to develop developers of young people. We develop teams that develop teams and the result is a mass grassroots movement of youth and family development sweeping across a city and transforming it.

This year has included the launch of a new website, the massive advance and development of our team in San Jose, Costa Rica, the training and relaunch of our team in San Antonio, Texas, the establishment of our international or global team and much more.

We began a corporate partnership with the Intel Corporation earlier this year and they are designing a web-based database for us that will be a massive help in allowing us to conduct our evaluation and measurement of how the young people and families we work with are being impacted.

Please take a minute to drop by the website at www.boywithaball.com and tell us what you think.

Beyond Good Intentions...The New BWAB Video

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:35:00 +0000

Changing the World is a Little Complicated

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:39:00 +0000

Making a difference is popular these days.

Everyone seems to want to save the earth or travel into another country for a week to "change someone's lives." I can identify with that desire completely. Maybe you are like me and you have walked out of a movie theater after watching some actor save the day or the world and you have wanted desperately to do the same.

What is surprising is how complicated actually trying to make a difference really is. I was walking through a squatter's settlement here in Costa Rica the other day and thinking about how really making an impact in someone's life requires so much more than most of us are prepared to give. It doesn't happen in two hours and, most of the time, there is little to no popcorn. This kind of work requires a significant cost including faith & hope.

Helping people requires time, vulnerability, failure, repetition, consistency, patience, endurance and a tremendous amount of hope. To help someone else change always requires change in me first. Lasting change requires small almost unnoticeable movements that no one else applauds or celebrates in the beginning. It requires the faith to believe that you are investing your life well over a long period of time in which you will see little to no positive results and usually just the opposite.

Walking Together into Making a Lasting Difference

I am not writing any of this to discourage you but actually to encourage you. The truth is that the desire in our hearts to help make a difference is not only noble but necessary. We were made to love, to care and to live lives of consequence. One of the greatest benefits in this journey will be the growth accomplished in our own hearts as we transcend our individual needs and learn each day to serve and love better.

One of the reasons that Boy With a Ball exists as a not-for-profit youth, family and community development organization is to provide people like yourself with the opportunity to make a difference by walking with us as partners in our work. Many of you have built beautiful lives in your hometowns, accomplished great things in the business world and then invested portions of your earnings in our work to help street kids and teen prostitutes in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica or gang members in San Antonio, Texas. Thank you for your help and for you faith and hope in our work to reach and equip young people and their families to be leaders capable of making a difference. I could not do what I do on a daily basis without you doing what you do daily. Together we are making a difference that I very much believe will endure.

The Brand New Boy With a Ball Website (www.boywithaball.com)

With all of that in mind, we have spent much of the year working with Canadian Web Designer Glenn Horning (thanks Glenn) to redesign Boy With a Ball's website in a way that would allow you to stay up to date on a weekly basis with what is happening within Boy With a Ball's teams. Please take just a moment to check it out today and then pass through the site each week to stay in contact with those you are helping us reach! In it you will find news, tools, photos, video and much more to keep you in the loop including an update on information for the Next Conference which will be held January 1-4, 2009 in San Antonio, Texas. Get in there and see how you like it all and fire us an email with tips and thoughts on how we can make it better.

What Could They Be? What Could We Be?

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:34:00 +0000

Developing young people would seem to be the easiest sell in the world.

Who wouldn't want to help a child or adolescent become all that they were made to be? What parent wouldn't want to see their own child fulfill their potential? What school administrator or teacher wouldn't want the same for the young people they care for?

The list goes on...what government officials and workers, aunts & uncles, police officers, social workers, politicians, grandparents, pastors and priests, siblings or local merchants wouldn't want to see the young people in their community thrive? After all, these young people are the future of all that we are currently building and fighting for. They are our progenitors, our legacy. Why wouldn't their development be important to us?

When you add to the equation that young people's vulnerability and the negative forces within our societies are currently wreaking havoc on the next generation, the question becomes even more poignant. Why wouldn't we care to help those who are hurting?

Even more crucially, why would we allow the future to be attacked and disabled without fighting for them? Why would we stand by and let the future of our communities be shaped and discipled so strategically and destructively by the drug dealers, the internet predators, the media profiteers, gang leaders and even by poverty itself?

Martin Luther King Jr. used to frequent the Edmund Burke quote saying, "All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Finding the Answers

Perhaps the greatest reason that we are currently being defeated in the battle for developing young people is less our apathy and our indifference than our own fear and confusion. We just don't know what to do or how to do it. We feel weak and without the capacity to help.

What if we could change that? What if we could commit one to another to do the work, to join hands and to find the answers we need to win the most important battle any generation can possibly face: the fight for the generation who will come after them.

Our Part in the Fight

Boy With a Ball exists as a non-profit organization to help families, schools, churches, governments, neighborhoods and young people themselves find these answers and put them into action. Our belief is that we can transform our countries, one young person, one family, one neighborhood, one community and one city at a time.

Our work in San Jose, Costa Rica and in San Antonio, Texas is helping us develop a deeper and deeper understanding of exactly how young people and their families can be developed most effectively.

Recently, Boy With a Ball began a formal partnership with the Intel Corporation. This partnership is a living one that will continue to grow as we identify more and more ways that our two organizations can work together to help equip communities to see their young people overcome high risk behaviors and thrive. We are thrilled to see what will come of this synergistic endeavor.

One important aspect of this push to see young people across the globe transformed is to see people like yourself drawn into the work. Please contact us at boywithaball@gmail.com for ideas on how you can get involved within your own community or globally. I would like to thank all of you who have continued to invest in the young people Boy With a Ball is currently reaching and equipping through your continuous financial support. We could not do what we do without you.

Boy With a Ball's New Website - An Important New Tool

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Working in community development involves a whole lot of bridge building. First of all, you have to walk into a community and do the ethnographical work of getting to know the people, the place, the strengths and weaknessess, assets and threats. All of this builds a bridge of understanding that can provide a basis for what comes next. Second, you have to find a way to build a bridge into these people's lives. This involves finding a way to be allowed to be present.

Sometimes we try handing out suckers in areas full of children, providing tutoring where school dropout rates are high or handing out coffee and cookies in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica where the community is filled with sex workers, addicts and homeless individuals. In San Antonio, our teams head to the basketball courts all through the weeks.

The next bridge to build is one that allows deeper relationships to form. This bridge is made up of mutuality, empathy and trust. As this step occurs, mentoring and small groups are built to serve as bridges that allow us to equip and educate the community members to be leaders capable of turning around their own neighborhoods.

One final interesting connection to bridge is between the world at large and the community we are developing. This has taken us a while to "get" but nonetheless we are getting it.

With that in mind, please take a moment to head to our brand new web site at www.boywithaball.com. This exciting new tool is a bridge between you and those we are working with. In the future, they will need you. They will need your prayers, your resources, your friendship and your ideas if they are to see their communities transformed and developed.

This website will be updated weekly with new photos, videos, podcasts and more and will even include a Boy With a Ball store in weeks to come.

Go ahead and walk across this virtual bridge and get to know these amazing people.

Jamie

Back One Year Later

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:21:00 +0000

Well...almost a year went by without us making a single entry on this blog.
What a year it has been. As an organization and as a team we have seen more growth and development in our impact then we could have every imagined.

We do realize, however, that this has made us pretty bad bloggers! As a result, we are making some changes. On Wednesday, you will see our new web page spring up at our old address: www.boywithaball.com. This site is a big step forward in keeping you connected to all that is happening in our teams here in San Jose, Costa Rica as well as on the Southside of San Antonio, Texas, U.S.A. This site will be constantly updated to provide almost a newspaper-like feel that allows you to flow as part of the team.

Alongside this effort, this blog will now become a regular tool that we will use to do the same work as the website. We are even bringing in a new intern to head the effort.

So please help us by getting in here and asking questions, making comments and spreading the word about Boy With a Ball and our work in reaching and equipping young people. We very much need you.

See you in the next few days!

Jamie Johnson
Executive Director
Boy With a Ball
boywithaball@gmail.com

Horrific News

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:52:00 +0000

Our team was told yesterday when we went down to Purral to hold the small group for prostitutes that Jovana, the young woman who hosted the study, had been killed over he weekend.

Please join us in praying for her three children and for the rest of the girls down there.

We are grieving as a team and yet this will continue to strengthen our resolve and our committment to making certain that these young women and kids downtown make it out and into the healthy lives they were created for.

Working to Help Working Girls in San Jose, Costa Rica

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:47:00 +0000

“Can you take me to Pueblo de Purral de Guadalupe?”
“No way, man. They kill taxi drivers down there. “

In the movies, the hero always faces a horrific challenge, makes a dramatic difference in the world and then the story resolves. The hurting are healed completely. The endangered are saved. The crowd roars. The photo bulbs flash. And they live happily ever after.

In real life, it is never so clear. The movie never ends and the credits never roll.

Today is Tuesday (as I write this) and Tuesday is the day we hold a small group meeting for prostitutes we have met downtown who are now looking for help in leaving the streets. The existence of this group is a miracle in itself. It took us almost three years to actually get it going. Three years of having to pass by these young women with coffee and cookies every week to get to know them only to be ignored or rejected. Three years of staying out late in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica. Three years of wanting so very badly to be able to help these girls (several of which are between 15 and 20 years old) while having to face the terrible reality that making a difference isn’t as easy as it’s cracked up to be.

You see, in real life, there is no director. No one has hired these girls to respond perfectly and humbly when you first meet them. No one has done anyone’s makeup or given anyone dramatic lines to say. The people who are being hurt and victimized don’t run into your arms and cry as you tell them, “It’s going to be okay. You’re safe now.”

It took three years of uncomfortable moments that exposed every weakness we have. Three years that made us think about quitting almost every night. The need was certainly there. We were there. The movie-like story though was not.

What We are Doing

Today, we will head down to the very small house of one of these girls. The house is in Pueblo de Purral de Guadalupe. Many taxi drivers won’t even drive us into the neighborhood. We will find one that will. We will take the twenty minute drive northeast of San Jose and we will be let out in a very poor and very dangerous street in front of a butcher shop. The people will all look scared to be outside and scared for us to be there. We will walk quickly to go down a side street and then down an alley to get to the young lady’s house. We will talk about what job she could find to cover her expenses and those of her three children.

She wants to stop having sex with men for money. She doesn’t want her children to know she has been forced into this life since she was 14. She is 27 now.
She has also asked us to talk to her about the Bible because her heart is empty, she says. She is scared but wonderfully sincere. Her life is changing but she is in no way now safe.

The good news is that others are starting to come. The dam has broken. The moment we dreamed of is now happening before our eyes.

Looking Ahead

This is the kind of work Boy With a Ball was created to do. We work to build teams that can see small groups and mentoring relationships begun. In the absence of positive gardens of healthy families, neighborhoods and communities, we work to build development gardens that can reach in and save young people and their families from dying and then, hopefully and by God’s grace, equip them to live.

It is worth every moment of the work and pain.

These young women are only one facet of the work Boy With a Ball is doing here in Costa Rica but it is enough to tell you about for today.

We are so thankful that so many of you continue to take the initiative to be involved in what we do through your financial support, your friendship and your prayers. In this way, we are a true multi-national team, working together to make a dramatically real difference in the very real lives of flesh and blood young people.

A New Boy With a Ball/FUNDADEJO Video

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 21:47:00 +0000

See what you think of this walk through a Nicaraguan squatter's settlement in San Jose, Costa Rica with Boy With a Ball teams...

La Bola Café...a vision on the way to fruition!

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Wed, 16 May 2007 19:09:00 +0000

Sorry to be a way for awhile. Things are moving quicker for us as an organization than we have the ability to chronicle. It is getting to be time to develop staff members who we can help us better paint the picture of what is happening.

In the picture above you see the proposed site for one of the current projects very much at the forefront of our work called the La Bola Café.

La Bola Café is a youth & family development café which will be located in the Los Colegios district of Moravia, Costa Rica, a northeast suburb of the nation´s capital, San José. Los Colegios means "the high schools" and is named so because of the presence of a concentration of high schools in close proximity to each other.

La Bola Café will be built as a warm & attractive coffee house similar to a Starbucks Coffee in the U.S. and will provide four different high-quality functions. It will be:

• An inviting coffee house where young people, their families and individuals in the area can walk into a soothing atmosphere with tasteful music playing in the background, an attractive ambience and the smell of good coffee and a well-trained and relational staff. Customers will be able to order coffee and pastries, purchase newspapers and some books and magazines and then sit down in either a comfortable armchair or at a table to read, talk with a friend, work or study.

• A full service internet café where young people, their families and individuals in the area can access the internet for an affordable fee, work on documents and projects using office software and print their work. This café would also provide technical assistance in each of these areas.

• An educational center where students can come and receive tutoring and assistance in English, other subjects and in completing their school assignments. Staff members would also be skilled in providing assistance in desktop publishing and putting together a resume.

• A positive youth development center where young people and their families can receive the necessary mentoring, community support and equipping resources to help them become healthy individuals and households capable of making a positive contribution to their family, neighborhood, church, community and to Costa Rica. Staff members will be deeply trained in all aspects of positive youth development including mentoring, leading small group communities and providing educational resources. A diverse schedule of activities will be provided each week.

Once developed and in business, this café model could very easily become our manner of expanding into other countries around the world.

Currently we are putting the finishing touches on the business plan in order to prepare to present it to corporations, foundations and individuals to attract the necessary capital to get it up and running by the end of the year.

A Tour of the Precario

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:28:00 +0000

Here is a virtual tour of the Precario with the Boy With a Ball team last Saturday.

We will do this more and more regularly and with better and better video quality. Get in there and meet these amazing people with members of the BWAB team.

A Day in the Precario

Snow, Meetings in Miami & Outreach in Costa Rica

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:49:00 +0000

As the Executive Director of Boy With a Ball (this is Jamie writing), one of my responsibilities is to travel away from my work in helping to build the San Jose, Costa Rica team both to go and support of our San Antonio, Texas team, to help build BWAB's involvement in camps and conferences in the U.S. and then to continue to represent BWAB and our work to the academic, corporate and government world.

I left San Jose last Wednesday and headed to Miami, Florida to be with Joseph Holbrook, a longtime veteran of the kind of work we do as well as the founder of a work on the southside of Miami that I believe is extremely important. Joseph is doing graduate work at Florida International University with a focus on Latin America and is an important advisor and supporter of what we are doing.

Joseph and I had great conversations including meeting with a psychologist, Dr. Sam Lopez and meeting with several of the young leaders in his group there.

On Thursday I drove over with former BWAB Costa Rica Street Team member Ruth Holbrook and had meetings with Dr. Pantin and Dr. Muir of the University of Miami Center of Family Studies. I will make a seperate post on how those meetings went but I believe they will be vital in helping us continue to learn how to reach into Latin American families in a way that strengthens the family unit rather than weakening the role of the father and mother as we connect with their children. Some of what we heard on Thursday could very well mean that most of what is being done to help Latino youth in the U.S. and Latin America could be doing far more damage than good. I will keep you posted in the next few days.

Yesterday I flew from Miami in the early morning to LaGuardia Airport in NYC. I was supposed to catch an immediate flight to Columbus, Ohio for some planning meetings for the ACM Conference but I never got there. Snow and ice came before I could get back on the plane and before I knew it, I was trapped! As I talked to airline representatives, I found that I would at least be trapped in New York City until Sunday and probably Monday. I was in the airport all day yesterday before taking a cab to Manhattan to stay with Ben and Heather Grizzle in Central Park West who have been very kind to take me in.

While I was trapped in the airport and then trudging through the snow and talking to my taxi driver about what it is like to be a Puerto Rican young person growing up in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Costa Rican Street Team member Anna Currie was heading into the Precario for our women's group in the morning and then coleading a team with Costa Rican team members that headed out into downtown San Jose to give out coffee and cookies to homeless kids, teen prostitutes, transvestite prostitutes and the like as a way of connecting with them and building relationships with them. This morning as I write this looking out the window at snow covered Central Park, Anna is heading out with team members there again to head into the Precario to do door to door relational outreach work.

This is the daily life of Boy With a Ball as we fight to help young people. Snow and ice, coffee and cookies. Puerto Rican taxi drivers in Brooklyn, transvestite prostitutes in Parque Morazan in San Jose. Psychology professors in Miami one day, single mothers in the Precario the next.

I hope to see many of you as I finally get out of NYC in the next few days and continue this trip.

A Great Story - From Street Child to Surgeon, Indian Girl Follows Dream

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 23:20:00 +0000

Reuters AlertNet - FEATURE-From street child to surgeon, Indian girl follows dream

18 Feb 2007 23:03:49 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Jeremy Lovell

JAIPUR, India, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Former child prostitute Chand has a burning ambition — to be a doctor helping India’s destitute millions.

And the 16-year-old girl is bright enough to realise her dream, according to the charity that 10 years ago rescued her from the teeming streets of the northern Indian city of Jaipur with a population of some three million people.

“I want to be a surgeon. There are too many people and too few doctors here,” the slim youngster told Reuters on a visit to the Ladli centre where she lives and learns in the sprawling metropolis dubbed the Pink City from the colour of its walls.

“That is my goal. In my society girls have very little chance to get an education. Here I have a chance,” she added, seated under a tree in the dusty yard of the school.

Her story is as heart-rending as it is common. Only the end is different — maybe.

Women, still considered by many as a commodity even in the 21st century, are neglected in the educational system and often sidelined in the social hierarchy.

According to UNICEF — the United Nations’ Childrens’ Fund — there are over two million prostitutes in India of whom some 500,000 are children or minors.

Some reports suggest that up to 200 women and children a day are forced into the world’s oldest profession to pay debts or simply to provide an income for their families.

OUTREACH RESCUE

Chand’s mother was a prostitute with 16 children living in Japiur’s red light area, and the girl — her family name has been withheld to protect her — was already a child prostitute when she ran away to eke an existence on the streets aged six.

Ladli outreach workers found her and took her in to the sanctuary that it offers for abused, orphaned and destitute children in the Rajasthan state capital of 2.8 million people, 260 km (160 miles) southwest of Delhi.

“We try to give the children here their lives back,” said founder Abha Goswami, 50. “We are giving love to our children. We are giving care to our children.”

Goswami, whose mother died when she was just 18 months old and who was orphaned at 16, founded the I-India project in 1993 giving help to 500 of Jaipur’s street children.

Three years later it set up the Child Inn boys home and the Ladli girls home and in 2000 it got its two School on Wheels buses touring the streets offering basic reading and writing lessons to children who would otherwise have no education.

Last year some 3,000 children passed through the hands of Goswami and her helpers — either through the buses or the four homes and one vocational centre — also called Ladli — that I-India now operates.

GIVING LIFE TO CHILDREN

But resources are scarce. The organisation can not offer residential care to more than a handful of children, so the majority go back home or onto the streets every night.

“We have street children, runaways, orphans, children of prostitutes — often child prostitutes themselves — and abandoned children from divided families,” Goswami said. “But we can’t feed everyone in our homes.”

Even for Chand, there is the constant threat of her past dragging her back to wreck her future.

“If I saw my family again they would want me back to become a prostitute again to earn money,” she said simply.

It is an endless struggle with scant help from the government and the centre heavily reliant on its own fund raising and foreign sponsors of individual projects.

One such project is for the children to make and sell jewellery.

At the moment it is 50 percent funded by a sponsor, but the goal is to make it completely self-sufficient — and for each piece that is sold some money is put into a bank account for the girls for when they grow up and leave.

The projects are a beacon of light in a country whose economy is booming but where some 35 million of the one billion population are orphans and where around 300 million people are living on less than $1 a day — of whom 140 million are children.

“Our children are safe here. We feed them and teach them … We give them skills and hope, so they can make their way and earn a living later in life,” Goswami said.

“For just a few dollars a day we can give life back to a child here,” she added.

Great report on poverty

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 16:27:00 +0000

I came across a fantastic 24-page report on poverty from the development arm of the United Nations. Many of the articles are helpful and clear in their discussion of what poverty really is. This has been helpful to our staff in allowing us to attempt to ask and answer questions of how to best deepen our work with the "impoverished" groups we work with including downtown with the homeless and prostitutes and in the precario.

The report can be found at:
http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/pub/IPCPoverty_in_Focus009.pdf

Take a look and then post any comments you might have.

Interesting new report from UNICEF on the state of young people in wealthier nations

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:13:00 +0000

The UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre this week released Report Card No. 7: Child Poverty in Perspective - An overview of child well-being in rich countries which focuses on the well-being of children and young people in the world’s advanced economies and provides the first comprehensive assessment.

The U.S. and United Kingdom did not fare so well in this report. The document can be found at this address:
http://www.unicef-icdc.org/presscentre/presskit/reportcard7/rc7_eng.pdf

What do you think the reasons would be that the U.S. would struggle? In a wealthy country that is reknowned for it's levels of philanthropy, which has an active civil society and a church on every corner almost, what could be missing?

Is it that these countries are strong, proud and productive within a system that places the system and productivity above human relationships and well-being? Is it that these nations have large immigrant influxes and are in conflict of how to respond to them? This does seem to be a problem in so many nations. We decide who should be here and who should not and yet that doesn't stop them from coming. What it does stop us from doing is responding to them in a way that will help them. "Why should we? They are illegal!" And yet they are here.

We begin to respond to them as illegal, invisible people and sense no responsibility to pay attention to them. Many of us see it as charitable to ignore them...at least we are not kicking them out. And yet the numbers of these people increase and they begin to define who we are as a country. Is that phenomena part of why the U.S. and U.K. are getting such bad grades in regards to how they care for their children?

Can You Take the Girl Out of the Precario?

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 00:20:00 +0000

Boy With a Ball or La Bola as we are called down here in Costa Rica took some important steps last week in our work in the precario or squatter's settlement called El Triangulo de la Solidaridad a few miles from our office.

Public schools started classes last week and the mother's of this precario when into a tizzy trying to gather the $100 or more necessary to buy all of the supplies and uniforms for their children to be able to go to school. School is so important. I know that statement may seem to be childish or overly simple, however, we are watching on a daily business as it seems that only those who go to school have any chance of making it out of this neighborhood of dirt floors and diseased soil, drug dealers, fear and hopelessness.

Costa Rica's average income is $6000 a year which is about 1/6th of what it is in the United States. The precario is even more dramatic in it's comparison to the average Costa Rican family. Family's probably struggle to make $1000-$1500 a year. (I will check on that in the next few weeks to confirm what that amount really is.) This income is made usually with the man of the house starting at 5 am and working on after dark six days of the week. Many families are in debt to the grocery stores for trying to buy rice and beans for their family.

In this economic situation, $100 for school for EACH child is impossible. Sadly, their child not being able to school is a life sentence of living in precarios.

We have made it a major focus to educate the young people and families on the importance of education. We have researched how to help kids who have dropped out get back in. So last week, when the moms began to crowd around us and beg for help with buying school supplies, we were kind of in no place to say no.

Unfortunately, as an organization, the last month was not a great one. We had no funds to put toward this. Many of us had even not received a full paycheck. However, it was impossible not to tell some of these moms that we would help...even out of our own nearly empty wallets.

As a last resort, I sent out an email update detailing the situation. I hoped one or two people might join in the fight and help us raise the $300 we needed to help these families. I was amazed by the response. One after another, emails came in. "We want to help." "Jamie, we will help." "We want to help." Individuals, couples, families, churches, organizations...one girl even put out a bulletin to her friends on My Space! (Thanks Annie!)

As a result, we have been able to expand our help in this situation. Team member Anna Currie and I had to hold back tears as Joanna, a mom of three, almost broke down when she saw us walk into her house with every thing her two boys would need to go to school the next day. She had probably given up hope. She couldn't stop thanking us and thanking God.

The week kept rolling. We had another installment of Soccer Night where a really healthy group of guys from a local church gather and invite all of the young guys from the precario to come and play soccer for two hours in an indoor arena. I will have to post about this seperately another day, however, it is so dramatic to watch these young guys from the precario sense that they belong with this healthy group of amazing kids. The mentoring dynamics that are happening in this situation are worth writing a book about.

Finally, the local church we have been helping in their response to young people held a youth camp and we helped staff it. We have been inviting two young people from the precario named Raquel and her cousin, Diana, to the youth group meetings lately. Raquel is the only person we have ever met in the precario who is graduated from high school and headed to the university. Our hope has been to surround her by some of the young women in the church youth group who go to the same university to help build a peer group around her to help support her and her family as they head into this new frontier of higher learning!

Their family is surprising considering their surroundings. They run a alterations business next door to their house. The father is a great father and the mom stays at home with the kids.

We are careful to focus on helping equip people within their situation for the most part. Taking a poor young person into middle class houses can sometimes hurt them more than help them. They can get awed by pretty furniture and big portions of food and feel hopeless in the situation. There is another way to do it where they are instilled with hope by the experience. We have hoped that this would happen with Raquel and Diana. With this in mind, we invited the two to the camp.

The two girls looked uncomfortable at times. They certainly had to face significant fears. Yet as we all drove back across the city to take them home last night in a bus filled with 60 Costa Rican youth, I could not help but be content.

It seems to be working for these girls...they are gaining strength in believing that they can make it our of the precario. They are gaining interest in their studies and building friendships that they are using to help give them a map of what they will need to have and be in order to live the lives they could not have even dreamt of before.

Who made a difference in your life?

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:33:00 +0000

Much of the work of Boy With a Ball is focused on relationships. I honestly believe that the world is in the state it is in because of negative relationships and the painful consequences that come out of them...broken families, abandoned children, abusive parents, hopeless communities, violence, manipulation, fear. The only way to fix the result of negative relationships is through positive relationships.

We focus on four main tools in this fight to put young people in the "garden" of positive relationships: aggressive outreach (we hit the streets in teams to go to where young people are, meet them and become their friends), one-to-one mentoring relationships, small group communities (the young people we reach and mentor are set into communities of caring adults and other young leaders where they can grow while being surrounded by others growing in the same situation) and then finally educational resources (we use the mentoring relationships and small group communities as a platform to offer training/counseling/coaching in the areas that young people need.)

My life was changed at 16 years old when I met a pastor named Jim Newsom in the midst of a tumultuous time. He pulled me into an amazing community of people who were growing and learning as I wanted to and the garden of these relationships equipped me to change dramatically in just a few years. Issues like character, spiritual development, relationships, finances, my future and much more were touched on and transformed.

If you have the time and don't mind sharing a bit of your story, who was the person/people that impacted your life?

Youth in Poverty and Precarios

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:51:00 +0000

Youth is synonymous with potential and hope. Robert Frost spoke of "nature's first green" being gold and all of us have felt the tremendous power and promise of a new day. Young lives are much the same. They are fresh and forming with infinite possibilities.

Working with youth is not about keeping them from dying. Death and youth are words that were meant to be strangers to one another. Death is already a horrific intruder into life but it is never more unsettling than when it touches youth. Young people were born to live, not to die. Like a plant in a healthy, vibrant garden, young men and women within healthy families and communities will grow up into healthy, wonderful human beings capable of as much as their faith will carry them to.

Many young people who grow up in poverty grow up in very healthy gardens. Their lack of material possessions, the latest styles of clothing or gourmet food actually serve to simplify their "garden" and prune their hearts to value what is important: relationships, family, friends, work, faith, hope & love.

However, poverty can also form into ghetto-ish gardens where families are not strengthened by the adversity of limited resources but fragmented and demented in their hopelessness and helplessness. Poverty is also often coupled with limited education which makes the individuals involved vulnerable to accepting incorrect ideas and perspectives.

Currently, Boy With A Ball Costa Rica is working in a Nicaraguan precario or squatter's settlement.

Every country, it seems, has the people that they don't need and, in fact, don't want. In Costa Rica, the group that fits this bill in many of the people's eyes are the Nicaraguan immigrants who flood into the country from the homeland to the north. Nicaragua entered the 1980's as the "breadbasket" Central America and exited the very same decade following the war between the Sandanistas and Contras as the poorest country in their region. Costa Rica, their neighbor to the south, has been a stable socialist republic for the last 60 years, providing free health care, education and more to it's inhabitants. As a result, Nicaraguans flow into Costa Rica in pursuit of a better life with better opportunities. Costa Rica 's reaction is predictable. Nicaraguans are called "Nicas" and are considered the reason behind almost every problem a Costa Rican has.

Many Nicaraguans can only afford to live in squatter's settlements called "precarios" where thousands of immigrants will crowd into a few acres and live packed into small shacks with dirt floors. Many of them can only get water from a small amount of water faucets located across the precario. As in any situation where poverty abounds and hopelessness with it, teen pregnancy, sickness, malnutrition, drugs, crime and gangs abound more. It is very difficult to emerge out of a precario and into a life beyond it.

Boy With a Ball/La Bola Costa Rica began going into this precario called Los Triangulos two years ago in connection with another local organization. Recently, our team has committed to going into this community several times a week. Our focus is to reach young people and families in order to draw them into one-to-one mentoring relationships and small group communities as a platform for providing educational resources that can help develop leaders within the precario. We hope to deeply reach and equip 5- 12 individuals within the precario who can then turn and do the same with their neighbors.

Do young people matter?

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 17:34:00 +0000

Do young people matter? Are they worth fighting for? Do they need fighting for?

These are good questions that can best be answered by realizing that the predatorial forces in the world are saying yes to all three. The child abusers, drug dealers, sexual predators, pimps, child pornographers, gangs and even other young people looking to use someone to feel better all have focused their attention on young people.

Why? Because they can and because it pays off so handsomely.

Young people are beautiful, fresh, full of life, gifted, fun and, above all, moldable. They are also less jaded, more niave and considerably more trusting. In a way they are like diamonds laying out on a front lawn...incredibly valuable and amazingly reachable. This spells danger.

A child abuser looking for an innocent to crush can take five steps out of his building to find one. A drug dealer looking for new blood has only to rent a hotel room, fill it with drugs and walk into the downtown area of any major city to invite dozens of youth. Two days and a massive drug binge later, the dealer has a whole new crew of addicts/workers who need more drugs and will do whatever he wants them to do to get them. A sexual predator can walk to the nearest playground and say a few nice words to a little girl or boy playing alone before inviting them back to his apartment for "candy."

A pimp can walk up to a beautiful young girl, seduce her, deflower her and then draw her into a life of drugs and sex for hire to deaden the pain and support the habit. Child pornographers can build relationships with any of the above young people, already damaged by someone before and lead them blindly into letting themselves be photographed. Gang members, in cultures where they represent power, protection and belonging, can easily recruit solitary young boys who are tired of being scared and alone, humiliated and weak. In the gang, they are offered the strength of community, mentoring and functioning in the power of a collective. They find shallow versions of loyalty, sacrifice and love easy bait when they have never tasted anything deeper. Young girls find themselves easily drawn into being the "property" of something so strong and so powerful.

Finally, young people themselves remain the most powerful predators of each other. The innocent girl growing up in the U.S. has quite a fight on her hands to be able to resist the way Hollywood spells out the journey of life. Her friends, most of whose parents are taken away by their work and their own conflicted lives, rally around TV shows and movies that paint a romantic version of love that involves life as a waiting game for the special boy who will show up and fall in love with her, overcome some singular adversity and then live happily ever after. The blogs, chat rooms, magazines and lunch room messages reinforce it all daily. When a boy who could possibly qualify shows up, driven by hormonal urges that she can satiate, it is hard to say no. All that is left is to negotiate how quickly to consumate her initiation into movie-like love. Sadly, it doesn't feel right. He doesn't act right. It doesn't go right. Even if she escapes the first "miss" without being pregnant, the next try and the next try and the next try come with increased risk to STD's, abusive relationships and pain. By the time she is ready for an actual relationship, much of her has been destroyed. Her "near misses" have left her missing.

Young people are being fought for and won every second of every minute of every hour. Seduction, addiction, devastation and elimination are the constant flow through the large majority of youth populations across the world. And as they are damaged, so is the future of each community, city, nation and the world. Disease, danger, high-risk behaviors and damaged, unfortunate outcomes are the constant result.

Who will fight for them for their good? For all of our good? Who will love them in order to add instead of seducing them in order to take? Who will bring them life, better life instead of deception and death?

Will it be you? Will it be us? Can we rebuild the mechanisms necessary to help them? Gardens of love like families, neighborhoods, churches, schools, communities that provide an atmosphere of protection, education, equipping, care and then releases them into their dreams? Every seed sown, every stalk watered will one day blossom into fields of flowers covering the landscapes of our world.

They are worth it. The future is worth it. It's time to fight.

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." Martin Luther King Jr., Accepting Nobel Peace Prize, Dec. 10, 1964

Young People Are Dying

noreply@blogger.com (boy with a ball) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:45:00 +0000

Imagine

Imagine a country decimated by the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world (costing the country at least $7 billion annually). Where more than five million high school age young people binge drink at least once a month. Where 53% of twelfth graders report having used an illicit drug in their lifetime. Where 17.4% of students reported carrying a gun to school in 2001. Where an average of 14 young people are murdered each day. Where a young person commits suicide every 15 minutes. Where 11 million young women and men report struggling with eating disorders. Where one of every 3 girls has had sex by age 16 and 2 out of 3 by age 18. Two of 3 boys have had sex by age 18. Imagine a country where young people between the ages of 13 and 24 are contracting HIV at the rate of 2 per hour.

The country you are imagining is the United States of America. Regardless of all of the horrific issues facing young people in Latin America, Africa and across the world, we must realize that the United States remains one of the most destructive places in the world to grow up. Something must be done. Please help us.

boy with a ball is a non-profit organization that works in teams to dynamically impact young people in cities across the world through:
• reaching young people in their neighborhoods
• equipping them to grow into leaders
• building communities of and around them
• releasing them to improve the world

You can help boy with a ball help young people today by getting involved.

Please become a regular visitor and participant in this website and spend some time checking out our website at www.boywithaball.com.

Together we can build a future for our communities and nations by equipping young people to listen and lead, live and love. There is no fight more worthy of living for. There is no fight more worthy of dying for.

Come fight with us.

Jamie Johnson
executive director
boywithaball
www.boywithaball.com
email-boywithaball@gmail.com
phone-866-510-3688

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Martin Luther King Jr.US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 - 1968)