Opening their home and hearts to a teen from Liberia

When Denny Ballough was 16 years old, he came to his parents, Gerald and Daryl, with an unusual request.

His longtime buddy, a 17-year-old Liberian refugee named John Sneh, didn't have any place to call home. Could he come live with us?

On this recent evening, the Balloughs have gathered in their Drexel Hill home to talk about the momentous decision they made 6½ years ago in the hopes of inspiring others.

"I was probably the most hesitant," says Daryl, 54. "In your heart, you knew it was the right thing to do. It was just the logistics of it, the reality of it. . . . That's a little scary."

Gerry, though, felt a compulsion to help because of his own past.

When the La Salle University biology professor and respected neuroscientist was 13 years old, his father died. His mother was struggling financially to support him and four siblings. Adrift, Gerry was free-falling in school as he struggled with dyslexia. Two years later, his mother sent him to the Milton Hershey School, a boarding school for disadvantaged children. The experience changed his life and put him on a path to a Ph.D.

"Then a young man asks of me what I asked of that school," says Gerry, 57. "Can you imagine the hypocrisy if I didn't say yes to John?"

In a family meeting back then, the Balloughs' older son, 18-year-old Dorian, worried about how his parents would be able to afford another child on modest incomes. "My parents are science majors. They're not that good with money," says the now-24-year-old who is working in Florida while he finishes his La Salle bachelor's in accounting.

But Denny kept coming back to the family values his parents had long espoused: Give a hand when someone is in need.

It was hard to argue with that.

This month, John, 24, graduated from La Salle with a bachelor's in marketing and a minor in communications and started a job at the Richmond, Va., headquarters of packaging company MeadWestvaco.

"I didn't realize how much was being done for me at the time," says John, in English that hints of his Liberian roots. "Looking back on it, it was amazing. It was life-changing for me. And I am so grateful for that."

In fact, no one knew back then how profoundly a single decision would impact each member of the Ballough family.

Rewind to the late 1990s. A 9-year-old boy was newly arrived to 69th Street in Upper Darby with Gus, his adult half-brother - both refugees of civil war-ravaged Liberia.

Already, John had seen atrocities that no child should. "I remember the civil war, a lot of people dying," he says sparely. "Everyone was trying to get out, any way they could."

The bloody conflict ultimately cost 250,000 lives. John says his father opposed the regime of the warlord Charles Taylor and was one of those murdered. His mother wanted to ensure the safety of her children and sent John with Gus to America.

In Upper Darby, the brothers found a community. An estimated 10,000 Liberians live in the Philadelphia area. Gus, an accountant, worked and went to college part time to earn his master's while John tackled third grade at Stonehurst Hills Elementary School.

"I had never been in class with a Caucasian person," he says. "I didn't know how to act around them."

He struggled academically and had to repeat the grade. He had so much trouble sitting still in class that a teacher suggested he channel his energy into playing drums. Perhaps it was providential.

At a district gala for young musicians, John first met Denny, who played the piano and went to Aronimink Elementary.

"He was kind of a goofball," says Denny, 22 now and studying psychology at La Salle. "He's still the same way. I gravitated toward him."

On the surface, the young men seem to be polar opposites. John is 5-foot-7 and stocky, his black hair cropped close. The redheaded, bearded Denny, at 6-foot-1, towers over him. John is loquacious and loves the limelight. Denny is quieter, weighing his words from the sidelines.

Yet the boys complemented each other. Over the years, they played basketball on the same Police Athletic League teams, which Gerry helped coach; became classmates at Upper Darby High School; and shared musical interests.

When he was in ninth grade, John says, Gus got a job with the United Nations and soon left for an overseas post. John asked Gerry if he could live with the Balloughs.

Gerry knew John had an uncle in Delaware and urged him to try there first. But after a few months, John had to leave when his uncle had a child and not enough space.

Denny knew his friend was in a tough way. "So I just asked my parents," he says. "I didn't know it to be as big a question as it ended up being."

As the Balloughs weighed the idea, John found a home for the summer of 2008 with the McCoyds, a family he knew from Riverview Presbyterian Church. But it turned temporary.

In the end, the McCoyds and another Riverview family offered a few hundred dollars a month as a supplement for those first couple of years so the Balloughs could afford to take in John. Daryl's parents also helped and continue to do so.

"Daryl and Gerry really stepped up and did yeoman's work," says Judie McCoyd, "not just housing him but really loving him and working with him and calling him to accountability. He's a better man for that."

When John moved in with the Balloughs in August 2008, no one was really sure what to expect. No one was even sure what to call each other.

"I hadn't called anyone mom or dad for such a long time," John says. Eventually, they settled on Dad B and Mom B.

Still, John says, he felt more like a guest at a sleepover. "It took a while to get comfortable, what are the rules." The high school junior now had someone - Mom B - who checked in about homework, and chores to do. Gerry had long, grueling talks with John about loyalty to family, the importance of humility, the need to appreciate what is given. John was made to write thank you notes to his benefactors from church. And he was chided when a relative asked what he wanted for Christmas, and he made a big-ticket request.

"We didn't want to just provide a safe haven for him," Gerry says. "He needed guidance."

John's focus on himself - bred of survival instincts - was one of the biggest frustrations for a family used to giving to others.

"Before I moved in, I was thinking about how do I make it," he says. Over time, he says, he has learned that what the Balloughs did for him was provide a gift he hadn't really earned. "That's why I strive to pay it forward," says John, who wants to make enough money to help others. Already, his voice mail says: "Make it a great day, or not. The choice is yours."

As a resident adviser at La Salle, John was a natural leader and went out of his way to help students adjust to college life, says Brother Gerald Fitzgerald, a La Salle accounting professor. "He was very conscious of people who were suffering."

Marsha Wender Timmerman, a La Salle assistant professor in integrated science, business, and technology, knows John through Enactus, a nonprofit that runs a competition for difference-making entrepreneurial projects. John led the team to national honors, she says.

"He is someone who is just driven," Timmerman says. "He's a survivor, a doer. You don't become a survivor without gaining strength."

Nowadays, John is just another Ballough boy, accepted and loved. But Gerry and Daryl make clear it was no easy road.

Daryl, in particular, oscillated about the family's decision. Rather than her day-to-day parenting winding down, she had another mouth to feed, another load of laundry to do, another teenager to guide - all with a full-time job as a science teacher at Media-Providence Friends School. She worried about a lack of privacy in her own home now that someone she was still getting to know lived there, and she worried that John's charismatic personality might overshadow her Dorian and Denny.

"I felt selfish for having those feelings," she says. But Gerry told her it was natural. "And I'd get back on track."

Thread by thread, John became woven into the family fabric.

Gerry and Daryl went to his wrestling matches - a kind of support that John had never had. They added his graduation portrait to the family photos on the mantel.

Some nights, John would wake up in a terror, and Gerry would talk to him. "Some of the stories," he says, "it's taken him years to tell them."

Gerry pushed John to speak mainstream English, rather than the street slang he knew from Upper Darby. He'd make him study President Obama's speeches. At times, Gerry and Daryl didn't care for John's flashy outfits or militant music.

Then they worried, Are we making him into someone he's not, smothering his culture?

The Balloughs do not belabor the racial differences. But sometimes others do. Once a neighbor called the cops on John, thinking he was a burglar when he was actually dropping off something at a friend's house.

Eventually, the three boys began introducing themselves as brothers and getting a kick out of the confused looks they received. And they grew closer.

Denny and John started a band with another friend. Scintillation, which they reluctantly share, embarrassed by the name now. They talked about dating girls.

John went to Dorian for advice on his major and career plans. "He was a mentor," he says.

John still remembers a family road trip when Denny said to him, "Talk to Mom," not, "Talk to my mom," as he usually put it.

"It just really hit me that I was part of the family," John says.

Denny, too, says he sees himself as a member of John's extended clan. "I want to meet his mother and Gus," he says. "It's never a bad thing to let more love into your life."

The family often spends evenings jamming together, Gerry strumming a guitar, Daryl singing along as Denny plays the keyboard and John slaps out a rhythm on a d'jembe, an African drum. Or the game's on with chess - a must-have skill for a Ballough, Gerry says.

"When he came here, there was this capsule around him that protected him as an island unto himself," Gerry says. "But that had to be broken down to be a family member."

Now John "is part of our lives for the rest of our lives," Gerry says.

"And," says Daryl, "we're better for it."