This life story qualitative research with Papua New Guinea youth shows how resilience is negotiated in a communal cultural context with limited access to formal social services. Using extracts from one life story, themes of family, faith and future are discussed. Implications for human services are the need to: engage informal social support systems through community development; recognize that young people have potential to change dramatically; and use a strengths-based approach. Implications for life story research are: methods can be culturally bound; stories are complex; stories can be collectively owned; and broad cultural representation is limited.
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