The teacher’s mood softened. She knew Zanna, who was born and
raised in Nigeria, had only been in the United States for a few
months. Like seemingly everyone else at Bishop McNamara High
School in Maryland, she was taken by this giant, quiet student who
was an emerging basketball star. As Zanna, now a fifth-year senior
center at the University of Pittsburgh, recounts this scene, he sees
it as a small story depicting a larger theme of his life in the United
States: The people he has met have made him feel comfortable in
his adopted homeland, whether they’ve helped him pick out skinny
jeans, taught him to speak American English or told him to go play
in the snow for the first time in his life in the middle of class.
“Two minutes,” the teacher said. “Don’t take long.”
Wearing a blazer as part of his school uniform, Zanna didn’t bother
to bundle up. He ran outside. He looked up. He held out his hands,
trying to catch the snow. His teacher took a picture.
“I’ll never forget that day,” he says.
A Long Trip
A bus station in Nigeria. Another day Zanna will never forget.
Zanna’s journey to the United States began when he participated in
a big man camp in Nigeria run by former Georgetown player Godwin Owinje. Bishop McNamara coach Marty Keithline, sweltering
in heat he had never experienced and appalled by poverty he had
never seen, discovered him there.
Not long after that, barely a teenager, Zanna sat waiting for a bus
that would take him to the airport, where he would start a series of
flights that would end in Washington, D.C. Once there, he would
begin his new life in America.
First he had to say goodbye to his father, Zanna Awami, with whom
he lived after his parents separated. “Do you really want to do this?”
Awami asked. This was a heartfelt question, not a discouraging one,
for his father had pushed him to move to the United States to pursue his basketball dream.
Zanna describes himself as “a daddy’s boy,” and leaving his father
remains one of the hardest things he has ever done. But Zanna said
yes. He wanted to do this.
He hugged his father. “He told me, ‘Good luck. In whatever you do,
stay wise. Always make the right decisions,’” Zanna says. “He said,
‘There’s going to be a lot of distractions but have fun with it.’ He
said, ‘Stay away from whatever is going to hurt you.’”
His head swimming with that advice and his heart pounding with
nerves, Zanna boarded the bus. He thought about that conversation
with