He has already been admitted to UNC’s medical school for this fall.
Working his way through three colleges, Mallah, of Rocky Mount, has helped staff two emergency rooms, reminiscent of those anxious moments when medics at Nash General Hospital tried in vain to save his father. He plans to specialize in emergency medicine.
His story starts before he was born, during the 1967 war in the Middle East. His parents, as children, fled the West Bank with their families. His father, Mohammed
Mallah, went on to graduate school in Berlin
and married a young woman from his original village. They moved to Kuwait, where
Mike was born. “We had a beautiful house on the ocean,” Mallah said.
But in 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The family of six fled to Jordan. Through
a refugee resettlement program, they ended up in Chapel
Hill, arriving with the clothes on their backs and $500.
Mike’s father, an electrical engineer, took jobs such as delivering pizza to help support his family, but they subsisted on very little. Later, he was laid off from IBM. He eventually bought a convenience store in Rocky Mount, where he worked 11-hour days.
Mohammed Mallah was fatally shot in an armed robbery in 1995. Mike Mallah was 10. His mother was devastated and friends advised her to return to the Middle East.
But she wanted her children raised and educated in the United States. Eventually, the family re-opened the store. “His blood was still on the tiles,” Mike Mallah said. “She wiped it up. We dusted the inventory … she had never worked with vendors or taxes or anything like that. All she was was determined.”
Mallah always wanted to go to UNC, but he started at Nash Community College and then East Carolina University, working full time all the while. “I’ve worked pretty much since I was 14,” he said. He experienced a long struggle to obtain a green card, which allows for permanent residency in the United States.
Finally, he was able to save enough money to buy a townhouse in Chapel Hill. Enrolling at UNC in 2006, Mallah, 24, finished his biology major in the College of Arts and Sciences through student loans, financial aid and jobs that have required him to drop back to part-time status in school at times.
Now his dream is to establish an exchange program in the medical school that would be named in honor of his parents. His Mom and all three sisters will watch him gain his degree this week-end in Kenan Stadium
