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CREDIT: Ray Smith, Times Colonist Bill Williams in his Street Life Ministry church in Nanaimo. Williams was born with club feet, deaf and diagnosed as mentally retarded. He has triumphed over great odds and now uses his Nanaimo Street Mission to help others.

"Each time my feet were operated on, I was in a cast from the tip of my toes to my hips -- both legs at the same time," Williams says about the early childhood operations to correct his feet. Finally, at 12, he says he was just learning to walk and talk like everybody else.

His foster mother, Faye, said from her home in Port Alberni that, "Billy's feet were turned toe-to-toe and his knees were knee-to-knee. But after the surgeries he was able to walk straight -- if he wasn't lazy about it."

Back in Port Alberni, Williams says he spent hour upon hour on the street in front of house walking up and down the centre line to learn to walk straight -- my mother joked that Eighth Avenue was my playground. I had to learn to ride a bike -- what everybody else already knew I had to learn to do."

Faye also remembers that Williams' knees remained weak and he couldn't "jump and run like most kids." Some of the school sports, she says caused Williams' knees to go out of joint and he'd fall. "That's when mama made a few minor threats that I would sue the asses off them if he got his knees hurt again."

Williams remembers that his foster mother drilled him relentlessly through the ages of 12 to 14 to make him catch up physically and academically on the lost years. "It was sheer hell. My mother -- as nice and loving as she meant to be -- got me to walk straight by force." She would also drill Williams on arithmetic -- punishing him, he says, if he solved the problems by counting his fingers or the cupboard doors in the kitchen. "Life was like a boot camp. If you could survive my mother, you could survive anything."

"I admit I was very strict on him learning his times tables," Faye says. "But yelling and pushing and everything would not have done any good if he didn't really want to learn ... but he didn't know how to do it by himself." Then she related a story where Williams scored over 90 per cent on a junior high math exam with problems that required calculators to solve -- except he forgot to bring one: "I was proud of him. I thought that was great!"

Did she do what she had to do? "She did what she had to do -- and I do thank her for that. I'm glad she did it. In retrospect, she changed somebody's whole being -- both their mental and physical state -- into a whole new person. I think that made me the way I am today, not that I'm hard-nosed, but that I'm able to handle difficult situations. She fought with and motivated doctors and specialists who predicted I'd be in a care home. By her example, I'm not afraid of speaking out when I have to -- for what's morally right from a Christian perspective."

But Williams didn't acquire his Christian perspective at home; actually he claims it was the wedge that alienated him from his foster family. At 15, Williams converted after becoming involved with a youth group from a Baptist church. "They hated that, when I became a Christian. They thought it made me a troublemaker."

"Billy might have thought that, but it wasn't," Faye counters. "We are a family that is basically atheist, but we taught Bill to think for himself -- not what somebody else told him to think." Especially the Jehovah's Witnesses: "I told Bill he could go to any church he wanted to but that one."