Auburn Mountainview senior Shaddye Melu is well aware of the opportunities he has been offered, both on the court as a member of the Lion varsity boys basketball team and off the court as an American.

Although he’s lived in Auburn for the past eight years, Melu, 16, was born in England and grew up in Zambia, a small nation in Southern Africa.

“(Living in different countries) makes me more thankful for what I have here,” he said. “I may not have all I want, but everything I have is enough. I always have what I need and some people don’t have that.”

The youngest of four children, Melu was born in England while his mother was attending college.

Soon he found himself back with the rest of the family in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, where his father, Bwalya Melu, was the director of World Vision’s Zambia office, directing charitable efforts in the impoverished country.

“I remember being driven to school everyday by a driver,” he said. “My dad had a pretty good job and we had a big house.”

When Melu was 5, the family pulled up stakes and moved to Milton Keynes, a town 49 miles outside of London.

Although language was not a problem – the official language of Zambia is English – Melu said moving from Africa to England was a bit of a shock.

“It was definitely a huge cultural shock going from a place like Zambia, where a lot of people know each other, to a place that has a lot of people from different cultures,” he said. “Zambia mainly has one culture. And it’s a collective culture, where you do a lot of things as a family. It’s not very individualistic.”

After three years in England, the Melu family found itself on the move again, this time landing in Auburn.

“When we moved here there wasn’t a lot of family, it was all new to us,” he said. “The way they do things is just different here. And a lot of the things that we saw on TV were true.”

Melu said he first noticed the little differences.

“We got off the plane and I had just watched the movie ‘The Fast and The Furious’,” Melu said. “And the first thing I noticed was that the traffic lights went straight from red to green. In England they go red to yellow then green. That was one of the first things I noticed.”

Athletically, Melu said his main sport in England was soccer and he played in youth leagues.

That soon gave way to basketball, football and track and field.

“The main teams were basketball and football in elementary and middle school, so I kind of got into that. My apartment complex at Gentry Walk, they had a pretty nice full court basketball court. It just looked intriguing, so me and my brother Josh (who also played for the Auburn Mountainview varsity basketball team) would just go out and play every day.”

Although Melu said he soon took to basketball, it was his introduction to track and field in elementary school that really ignited his competitive fire.

Last season, as a junior, Melu competed in the Washington State 4A Boys Track and Field Championship meet, taking seventh in the high jump with a 6-foot-4-inch jump, and 12th in the 400-meters with a 51.37-second time.

His performance last season garnered him attention from track coaches from Seattle University, the University of Idaho, Purdue and the UW, which he hopes to attend after graduation.

Two years ago, Melu got an opportunity to go back to Zambia on a visit.

“It was nice to see the improvements that have happened,” he said. “It’s not such a big country that has everything together already. It’s just kind of progressing as every year goes by, even months. It was also nice seeing a lot of my old friends and family, people I hadn’t seen in a long time.”

He credits his trip back, and his time living abroad for helping him appreciate the gifts available to him as an American.

“It gives me a bigger image of life,” he said. “When I see people that don’t have the same opportunities in life as me, it makes me strive to make it more in life. I have opportunities that they don’t have, like higher education in the best country in the world. Living here gives you much more opportunity than people who are stuck in small countries.”