What's more astounding is that Poquie and Snoh, complete strangers, are here at all. Of greater unlikelihood is that the two boys - whose families fled the West African nation of Liberia amid civil war and landed in Philadelphia within a year of each other - would cultivate, on opulent prep-school campuses far from home, rich futures against adverse odds.
Snoh, one of nine children born in Sinoe, Liberia, never knew his parents, Joseph and Rebecca, who died in 1995 from illnesses that not even his eldest sister, Joanna Snoh, 37, can recall.
"In the war, with people running for their lives," Joanna Snoh said, "you can't get any medical needs."
When Poquie's mother, Mary Nyeayea, led her four children from Nimba, Liberia on a daylong hike - on back roads to avoid rebels manning the main thoroughfares - to Ivory Coast, his father, Martin, did not flee with them. In the winter of 1999, the family, with Poquie a 4-year-old, landed in Staten Island, N.Y., moving to Philadelphia in 2001.
His parents gone, an infant Melvin Snoh and seven siblings were sent to a refugee camp in Ghana, living there in poor conditions for three years.
"There is no food, no water, they are filthy," said Joanna Snoh, who had come to United States as a teenager and was not with her siblings then.
It was there, however, that Melvin Snoh touched his first soccer ball.
"From what I can recall, I've been playing my whole life," he said.
In 2000, Joanna Snoh brought her family to America with the aid of a refugee program. Melvin was five.
As children, Poquie and Snoh attended public schools - Poquie in Southwest Philadelphia and Snoh in Coatesville.
