HOUSTON -- A young man who came from a place that offered no hope and no future wound up in Texas in a school that propelled him from war to college.
Nhial Malia arrived in Houston in 1999 at age 11. By the time he got to Chinquapin, a private school just outside Houston, he had spent half his life in refugee camps.
Malia was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, thousands of children orphaned by war, famine and disease.
"I lost one of my older brothers when I was nine, and it was the hardest thing that ever happened to me," Malia said.
He would help bury four more siblings over the next three years. Then he became one of thousands of Sudanese boys resettled in the U.S.
He started at Chinquapin in the seventh grade and the former refugee found refuge. Teachers and board members embraced him and encouraged him and they became his family.
"The teachers here really took me in," Malia said. "I came to this country, I couldn't read a book. My first book was Tom Sawyer."
Chinquapin accepts children from low-income families and gets them ready for college. All of its graduates go to college and 85 percent of them get degrees.
"The kids that come here know they are getting into something very unusual, but they also have a sense that this is a place that will change the direction of their lives,” said Ray Griffin, the school’s director.
Malia said his teachers dared him to dream and had great expectations.
"In this place having a dream and being able to walk through them, and accomplish them, is like, this is good," he said.
He starred in track and soccer at Chinquapin, graduated on time and earned an athletic scholarship to Bethany College in Kansas.
Malia was sworn in as a U.S. citizen four years ago and he graduated from college last year with a degree in biology. A boy who was once shy and timid, now offers advice to other Chinquapin students.
"You stick it out, and in a couple of years you will be somewhere in college. You just have to believe," he told one young student.
Malia recently signed up for the Peace Corps. He said he wants to go back to Africa.
"If I help kids in Africa, I reclaim back a part of me that I buried, that's just how I look at it," he said.
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