Mentor as anything - and Big Brother is watching you

By The Age Newspaper | Sunday 13/11/2011

Lean on me: a big brother as well as a good friend, Cam with Shannon. Photo: Craig Sillitoe
SOME kids learn the harsh truth early on: families are not from storybooks, and friends are hard to come by when you are 11 years old and at sixes and sevens with the world. Just ask Shannon, who can't remember a time when it was easy.

"I turned into a person who doesn't really trust anybody," the 15-year-old says, painting a picture of a young life disrupted by his parents' divorce when he was a toddler, a distant relationship with his father, and a mother whose health problems have sometimes made it hard.

"You've got all this stuff going on and you think it's all other people's fault,'' he says. ''So if you stay away from people you don't get all the crap."

It's been a roadmap to loneliness and confusion, but four years ago Shannon found a signpost that helped point him on a sturdier path. It wasn't yet another counsellor, poking and prodding for answers he could not articulate - but a mentor, an older man with no agenda beyond a willingness to be a mate.

Through the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, Shannon was matched with Cam - 25 years his senior, and a man who got involved as a way to channel his own experience into a friendship with a youngster who might benefit from it.