There are two directions in life that are important to Dr. Heval Mohamed Kelli: Giving back, and paying forward.

Mohamed Kelli and his family depended on others’ kindness and assistance when they immigrated as Kurdish Muslim refugees to Clarkston, Ga., in the 1990s. His father was in poor health, so Mohamed Kelli, who was 17 at the time, became the primary wage-earner even though he didn’t speak English and they had no car.

He says that despite the fact that his family was of a different faith, the members of a local Episcopal church were the most crucial part of helping his family find their footing.

“My mother was wearing a headscarf. You couldn’t ignore the fact that we were Muslim,” he recalls. “And still, the church members were the biggest part. And that is how the world should function. If a Christian family takes refuge in a Muslim country, it should be the first thing for the religious group of that country to help them out, which is what happened. And it’s still so.”

Today, Mohamed Kelli is a cardiology fellow at Emory University’s School of Medicine. He volunteers at a health clinic that’s only a block away from the apartment his family lived in when they first moved to Clarkston. And he says he was only able to make such a substantial change because other people helped him: People connected him to a job washing dishes; they introduced him to mentors in the medical field; one even provided transportation so he could get an in-state tuition waiver for college.

“The simple act of this 80-year old woman, who picked me up at 8 a.m. in the morning in her big Ford car,” Mohamed Kelli remembers. “She brought me to Georgia State, and drove me back. I mean, yes, it was a simple ride, but it was a powerful thing, for her to believe in me and do this one step for me.”

“It has been an amazing experience for me, and now I’m a citizen. My roots are in Syria, but I feel like my future is in the United States.”

Hear Mohamed Kelli’s idea at TEDxPeachtree 2016.

Photo credit: Heval Mohamed Kelli

Aly Merritt is a former copy editor with a residual addiction to journalism. She is currently a product manager at SalesLoft, and sporadically blogs at www.AlyintheATL.com.