I became involved as a volunteer at the time many of the children were reaching their teen years. The church, as well as the neighborhood around it where the kids lived, was then a blighted area of the city. Prostitutes walked the sidewalks in front of the church and drug paraphernalia was often trashed in the church’s unusable and ramshackle Scout hut. I once attended a meeting to talk about attempts to redeem a nearby street of shops. One shop owner tossed a handful of spent bullet casings on the table to demonstrate what he would find in front of his store on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

After I began volunteering, several of us decided we needed a program for the teenagers. Although we began with the usual “fits and starts,” I ended up coordinating this program and supervising volunteers and some part-time staff. We began the program around a basketball goal, the grassy field and meeting space in the church. The basketball goal was at first a frequent casualty. Kids and adults who lived nearby could quickly bring it down after program hours by hanging on the rim. But we kept putting it back, added a net, and left it available for anyone to use. Eventually the goal became a fixture of the neighborhood and only came down one other time when the Program Coordinator (named Herin) accidentally backed a bus into the pole!

Because it was a church program, we met first on Sunday mornings in what amounted to a Sunday School class. This was not, however, your typical Sunday class. The kids had no interest in a class. They brought their basketballs and often kept them bouncing under the table. Once they brought hazelnuts and began cracking them by slamming basketballs against them on the tabletop. When we later held classes in the newly renovated Scout Hut that did not yet have a working furnace, the kids amused themselves tossing paper into a kerosene heater.

Yet the kids continued to come. As several frowning adults let us know early on, the answer was simple: they came only to play basketball after the class. And that was true. These were 6th and 7th graders after all. But they kept coming when we added music and drama, teaching some of them to play drums and guitar and writing and performing a play and later an original musical. We even added dance when we had a wonderful young woman who could teach them. Several of the kids formed their own band of drums, guitar and vocalist. The drums were a wired-together set scavenged from pawn shops – an orange bass drum, two red toms and a snare that matched neither. The drums were eventually replaced by a donated electronic set and an added keyboard. (Photo: The Band). Later a summer intern and his family supervised the creation of a large wall mural in the Scout Hut, which the kids designed, drew and painted depicting the program’s activities.

We expanded the program to meet Sunday afternoons, with basketball, soccer, volleyball, flag football and lessons in such esoteric games as golf and croquet. We also began taking summer trips, spending most of a week in Washington, D.C., Orlando (Photo: Touring the Kennedy Space Center), at the beach and in the mountains, trips that each teen had to earn through 20 hours of volunteer work in the community and community agencies. For three summers, a group of our kids spent a week living in a Tennessee camp with other teenagers where they worked in a day camp for children from rural poverty (Photo: Vicheth and Day Camper). Over the years, our teenagers attended plays, musical events, and museums. We took them skiing, white-water rafting, and spent a memorable day on “basketball street” and at team practices when the NCAA Final Four came to Charlotte.

We began an after-school tutoring program and provided opportunities for high school juniors and seniors to explore higher education and vocational training. Along the way, we worked with families, teachers and counselors.

And when a teenager got in trouble, we worked with that too. And there were times of serious trouble – runaways, car thefts, a schoolyard assault, an armed robbery and a summer in which the program and some of its participants were subjected to gang-type threats.

I titled this blog “Encountering Billy Nguyen.” So how were these kids like Billy Nguyen, the fictitious 16-year-old in Absolution? Although the teenagers who came through our program had many things in common, particularly refugee parents and the low income neighborhood, each was a unique person. Some would have done well in their lives despite their childhood circumstances. Others seemed bound for trouble. The ones most like Billy were those who might have gone either way, those for whom a program like ours can make a real difference and I believe ours did. I believe it also made a difference too for the kids who seemed innately motivated to do well in school and stay out of trouble. One told me some time after he had graduated from high school how important it was for him and his friends to have, as he put it, “a place to come, a place that was ours.”

In the years since I worked with this program, I have attended college graduations, wedding banquets, Buddhist ceremonies of blessing for babies, citizenship naturalizations and many reunions. One of our young men is an officer in the United States Navy. Another served as a Naval medical corpsman in Fallajah.

But there have also been kids like Billy who found their way to serious trouble, including homicide. One poignant night after I had left the program, we held a reunion dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. As more than twenty young adults gathered at the restaurant, we wondered if others could get there, because we had heard news on the way to the restaurant warning of roadblocks around that area. A Southeast Asian male was holed up in a house threatening to shoot police outside. All of us in the restaurant knew that young man. He was one of the troubled kids we had never reached. As much as I love to recall our successes with this program, and there are many, when I write about Billy Nguyen, I can’t help remembering the kids we lost.