Profile: Majovie Bland

As a teenager, Majovie Bland couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life anywhere near that patch of urban pathos called Mantua.

On the wings of a free college education, with George Weiss as his mentor and Donald Trump as his muse, he was getting out. First stop, the University of Hartford.

Today, at 32, Bland has his bachelor's degree in economics and finance - but no intention of abandoning the old neighborhood.

What changed everything was a bullet.

His mother still lives in West Philly with his younger half-brother, in a first-floor apartment with a ramp to the sidewalk. In January 2003, at age 16, Byron Smith was shot accidentally at a friend's house. A gun found beneath a pillow. Some horseplay. Suddenly, the teenager was on the floor, bleeding and unable to move.

Smith has used a wheelchair for more than four years now; he is paralyzed from the shoulders down and bound to a ventilator. He spends his days watching television and, with a mouth control, navigating the Internet. He is reading up on what could one day be his salvation, stem-cell research.

Since the shooting, caretaking has been Majovie Bland's mission - one that has grown beyond his brother's needs to encompass the ailing neighborhood.

Running through his story is a theme that echoes in the lives of more than a few of his Belmont 112 classmates: there but for the gift of George Weiss.

Although he now lives nearby, in Upper Darby, Bland remains a familiar figure in his former stamping ground. He shakes his head in dismay as he drives near Belmont Elementary, along blocks pockmarked with weedy lots and tumbledown houses. Just like 20 years ago, maybe worse.

Back then, he was a decent but not spectacular student, with a craving for respect and money that easily could have drawn him into the street life. Often at odds with his mother, he was hungry for male role models. But instead of looking for them on the corner, he found them in Weiss, Say Yes coordinator Randall Sims, and the powerful people in their orbit.

Among them was Philadelphia minister and businessman Joe Watkins, who accompanied the class on an eighth-grade field trip to the zoo. Bland remembers the boys kidding Watkins, an African American, about how he spoke and dressed.