Vancouver-based Boys Club Network hopes to go national

Play depicts the complicated family relationships of a couple of the boys and some mentors

OTTAWA (CCN)

The Vancouver-based Boys Club Network brought a play about its founding to Parliament Hill Nov. 29 in hopes its mentoring program for at-risk boys will go national.

Using professional actors, the play Man Up!-the true story of the Boys Club Network, showed how high school administrator Walter Mustapich and fine arts department head Jim Crescenzo set up a club ten years ago in East Vancouver for boys who were drifting into crime, drugs and lifelong poverty for lack of positive male role models.

Mustapich and Crescenzo, both Catholics, were present at the event, sponsored by Canada’s Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan, Member of Parliament for Vancouver-South, and Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, Member of Parliament for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky.

“I was truly lucky to find a mentor in the right time of my life,” Minister Sajjan, a mentor for the Boys Club Network, told the audience of MPs and Parliament Hill staffers who attended the play. “Another friend of mine ended up six feet under.”

“If we don’t hold the opportunities out, we as a society will be losing out,” Sajjan said. Sajjan is a mentor with the Network.

The play involves four young men: a First Nations youth who is bullied and beaten up by other students; a black youth whose abusive father pressures him to deal drugs at the school; a white youth from an affluent family whose father is too busy as a judge to spend time with him; and a youth from a Vietnamese background who became involved in one of Vancouver’s most powerful Asian gangs.

The actors portray the anger, sense of hopelessness and casual violence in the young men’s lives and the emotional risks the two educators take in reaching out to them. The play also depicts the complicated family relationships of a couple of the boys and some mentors, including a Vancouver police officer.

Dzinh Nguyen, who joined the Boys Club ten years ago at the age of 15, plays himself in Man Up!

Though he grew up in a Catholic family, his parents were so busy working trying support the family that he drifted into the gang life as a loan shark in one of Vancouver’s biggest Asian gangs.

“I was one of the original boys,” Nguyen said in an interview. Though the play has some “small subtle changes,” it is about 95 per cent his story.

Nguyen said it took about two years for him to trust Jim and Walter, “that they were for real” and they “really meant what they said about unconditional love.”

“It took me a very long time to understand that concept,” he said.

For him and for many of the boys, there is no one big turning point where they “decided to turn a new leaf,” Nguyen said. Instead, the process of transformation starts at the beginning “where they accepted us with open arms.”

“They really did try their best to show they cared and they validated us,” he said.

Some had on a single mom as a parent; some had no parents; or their parents were too busy and absent from their lives. Jim and Walter advocated for them if they got in trouble. Nguyen said he realized now they “put their lives, their livelihoods, their jobs on the line just for a bunch of screw-ups.”

“I think because of that, you come to realize there is goodness in this world, there are people who love and care about you and it’s not too late to change who you are and make up for the mistakes that you’ve created,” he said.

Nguyen said he recalls praying nightly as a child that God would send someone to help his family. “I always believe that things happened for a reason and on many, many, many nights were I was super depressed and terribly said, I would always pray,” he said. “I might have missed a lot of Sundays, but I would always pray every night. I always had a to question ‘What do you want from me? Why? Is this the right way? Is this the right path? Let me know, help me out here, because I’m hurting right now and I don’t know what else to do.”

He didn’t think his prayers were answered at the time. “That’s where I kind of went awry and made the choices that I did.”

“However, with the introduction of the Boys Club, I finally realized my prayers were answered,” he said. “I think the journey that God had for me was a little bit different. I think that God wanted me to understand the pain that is out there for a lot of children and youth who can’t help themselves, so that one day He would hope that I would be able to help out the youth.

When the play ended, Mustapich explained Nguyen was studying to be a financial planner with the goal of becoming a philanthropist one day.

Mustapich explained the reason for the Boys Club Network is that teenaged boys are four times more likely to commit suicide; five times more likely to drop out of school, and 18 times more likely to be a victim of a major crime.

Over the past ten years, the network has grown to serve 500 boys in 14 chapters in schools throughout British Columbia, he said. A common denominator among the boys is a lack of a positive male role model in their lives. Ninety per cent of Boys Club members stay in school and graduate.

Mustapich said 22,000 people have seen Man Up! free of charge because of the generosity of donors. Many of the actors, who have an array of professional credits in television, film and on stage, both in Canada and in the United States, serve as mentors.

After performing on Parliament Hill, the Boys Club Network took the play to four Ottawa Catholic schools.