loveLife is a high profile, expensive and controversial nationwide awareness and prevention campaign that has been addressed at young South Africans since 1999. This paper examines the discourses 20 Black youths used to narrate their involvements, satisfactions and difficulties as peer educators. The primary data sources are individual interviews with the peer educators along with a review of printed materials in English and visits to one loveLife Y-Centre in KwaZulu-Natal and to the loveLife provincial office in Durban. The analysis develops four themes in the talk of the groundBreakers: knowledge and self-knowledge, personal development, generational conflict with parents over talking about sex and poverty. These themes are discussed in relation to broader discourses on representations of youth, the pushes and pulls of modernity and tradition, agency and dependency. (Contains 8 notes.)