ENTRY DESCRIPTION
LEONARD



When we met Leonard he was sitting, crosslegged, at the corner of Adelaide and Bay streets in Toronto. Resting on his lap was a big cardboard sign that drew many a chuckle from passersby. It read: “Broke and Sexy, anything will do. Thanks and God Bless.” The sign also had a happy face with the caption, “Happy, Happy, Happy”—a word that appears to capture Leonard’s character well. For throughout my 10-minute photo shoot with him, he had a smile that lit up his face. And on more than one occasion he laughed uproariously.

But despite Leonard’s brave front, life has not been easy for him. When, in response to his comment that he has a daughter who is a nurse, my dad said, “So if you get sick you know who’s going to take care of you, eh?”, he replied, “That’s right. Well, I’m pretty sick as it is. I’m a seven-year survivor of cancer. All natural healing, people praying over me. I’m doing pretty good, [but] I’m still in a lot of pain with bone marrow.”

Leonard has, for the past several years, been hitchhiking back and forth between Toronto and Halifax. However, he told us that his declining health may soon make this impossible:



…it’s a little bit harder to get around with the cane….[That’s why] I’ve been thinking of settling down. If I got backing from the government it would be different. [If I did] then I could settle down, right? [And] I could afford rent. But I can’t afford rent. [I] barely make enough out here to survive each day. So it makes it hard. But I keep a smile on my face [and try to] be happy all the time.

AUTHOR
Leah Denbok is a 17-year-old grade 12 student at Collingwood Collegiate Institute. For the past four years the Leah has been mentored by the National Geographic photographer and Fellow Joel Sartore. When Leah was only 14-years-old, Joel said of Leah, "If she sticks with it I think she is well on her way to becoming not just a good photographer but a great photographer. And I'm not kidding." This past August Leah was invited to exhibit her photography at Christ Church Cathedral during the Supercrawl event in Hamilton. Afterwards, the internationally known street photography, Alex Zafer, posted a comment on Facebook in which he said of Leah, "This is a young woman with an obviously high EQ, mega talent, and a terrific eye for humanizing homeless people on the streets who are so often looked upon, or looked-over as subhuman." After graduating from high school Leah intends to study photojournalism at university.











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