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CREDIT: Ray Smith, Times Colonist Laurie Lester, Sylvia and Bill Williams hope to expand their Street Life Ministry by renovating the house next to their church so they'll have a place to house the homeless.

Every day, 44-year-old Nanaimo Pastor Bill Williams opens his church's doors to show a little kindness on his city's mean streets. "We're in the heart of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, theft... you name it, it's in this area," Williams says.

Street Life Ministry, his outreach program, is also the only physical church "in Nanaimo's red light district."

"Most churches wouldn't want to be here,'' Williams says. Maybe so, but he isn't squeamish about reaching down into the murky depths of humanity to help. His greater objective is to help people pull themselves up. He says Street Life does it through direct counselling and "educating them about the facts of life, especially if they have problems with alcohol, drugs and anger."

Williams sees nobility in the nobodies and potential in the powerless, probably because the facts of his own life meant he started further behind the pack than most anybody he counsels and motivates.

He was born Bill George in 1960 at the Nootka Mission hospital in Esperanza, a remote Indian village off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island reached only by seaplane or boat. He started life with two severely clubbed feet, was almost stone deaf and diagnosed as mentally retarded. He believes his mother's drinking habit contributed to his complications. "She was an alcoholic, a profuse alcoholic, as was her mother, too."

Given up for adoption, Williams became a ward of the court and was placed in a series of foster homes until his social worker delivered him to the Williams family in Port Alberni.

"I was just turning six. Prior to that, no family wanted me because of my complications ... I was too much of a problem.

"I remember (the social worker) saying -- I could read lips -- 'I'm not going to see you again.' I later found out I was her last case before she retired.''

The social worker gave Williams a teddy bear that he still has.

"Of all the things that got moved, lost, stolen over the years, my teddy bear is still around. I named him Booboo."

Williams crawled up the front steps with Booboo and sat by the front door of yet another family. But this time he would stay around awhile.

The first few years at the Williams's home were good. Several months after joining the family, Bill was watching his foster father, Ronald, tie a fishing knot. "My foster dad noticed and he passed me a hook and a line to let me try it -- and I did it! Then everybody started jumping up and down saying, 'He's not stupid! He's not stupid!' "

William's foster mother, Faye, brought Williams to Dr. Legge in Nanaimo, an ear, nose and throat specialist. "He saw potential for me to hear. Then came a series of tests in Victoria where I remember all these doctors examining me." The examinations led to a series of six operations over several years.

"The day I walked out of the hospital able to hear properly for the first time, I was 12. I heard the wind blowing, cars honking, people talking, birds singing ... but I didn't even know what these sounds were. It was too loud and I wanted to be deaf again.