In short shorts and a bow tie, a classic British-style schoolboy outfit popular in his old country, 7-year-old Abdel Nader walked into the lion’s den of Chicago’s Apollo Elementary School.

“Everybody is looking at me like, ‘Yo, what are you doing?’,” Nader recalled.

The newly-arrived Egyptian immigrant didn’t know any better, and he wouldn’t for a while. How can you understand why you’re being teased when you don’t even know the language?

“They were gettin’ me,” Nader chuckled. “Those kids get after it if they get the chance.”

Nearly two decades ago, in a sea of late ‘90s jeans and t-shirts, flannels and hoodies, someone who looked different and talked different strode into school wearing something very, very different.

“I was just confused. I wouldn’t even call it culture shock, because I didn’t even have a culture of my own yet,” Nader explained, recounting that teachers thought he wasn’t smart because he never spoke in class. “I was still growing up. It wasn’t like I lived in Egypt until I was 16 and then I came over and there were completely different norms. I didn’t even get the time to adjust to those norms.”

Through basketball, Nader received a college education, found his calling and carved out a comfortable place in American society. Now, in 2019, Nader has two Thunder teammates in Hamidou Diallo and Dennis Schröder who can relate with their own growing pains.

Each day the 10-year old Nader waited at Chicago’s Washington Park until everyone left the basketball court, then he’d go out and play by himself.

Eventually a kid named Latrelle began to join him and make him play one-on-one. Silently they’d play, until one day when Latrelle finally stopped and asked, “Do you have any video games?”

“No,” Nader replied, dejectedly. “Do you?”

“No,” admitted Latrelle. Then a lightbulb turned on. “Let’s go to my cousin’s house!”

Young Abdel had made a friend.

Nader’s parents, Ahmed Youssef and Amina Rehama, never had the time or energy to make friends between constantly working and focusing on family. They brought Abdel and his older sister Sheri over to the United States from Alexandria, Egypt, when they were just toddlers.

They stayed in tenant homes to live near an uncle who had married an American woman years before. The Naders weren’t technically refugees, but the United States government understood why they came west, gave them refugee visas and provided a landing spot for families like theirs to get on their feet.