By Jeremy C. Fox Globe Staff

Family is at the heart of Fatah Adan’s success.

Devotion to his eight siblings and their Somali parents, who fled civil war to give their children a better life, has guided his journey from birth in a refugee camp to Harvard University, where he will be a freshman this fall.

“There’s a kind of reverence that he has toward his mother and his father that I think is unique among teenagers in America of any generation,” said Ravi Singh, Fatah’s debate coach at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, where Fatah is this year’s valedictorian.

Fatah, 18, credited his parents with giving him the will to succeed.

“They did everything they could to come to America,” he said. “I have that want to give back to them. That’s what’s driven me all throughout middle school, high school. That’s what’s going to continue to drive me.”

Singh, who recruited Fatah for the debate team when he was a freshman in Singh’s history class, said he was an unusually poised 14-year-old, even at a tournament when his debate partner, Elvis Alvarado, was homesick and Fatah faced off alone in the final round against two juniors.

“They looked like men — they were tall, and they had deep husky voices — and there was Fatah, who at that point in his life was probably 80 pounds soaking wet,” Singh recalled. “He just destroyed them. It was amazing.”

‘They did everything they could to come to America. I have that want to give back to them.’

Fatah is studious but far from humorless, Elvis said; he is known at New Mission as the creator of catchphrases that serve as all-purpose answers to any question, such as “You know the rules.”

“I’d be like, ‘Fatah, why’d you get an A on this test?’ He’d be like, ‘Cause you know the rules,’ ” said Elvis, 17, making his voice deeper and more forceful to mimic Fatah’s. “You’d be like, ‘Fatah, why are you eating a hamburger?’ He’d be like, ‘You know the rules.’

Singh, who recruited Fatah for the debate team when he was a freshman in Singh’s history class, said he was an unusually poised 14-year-old, even at a tournament when his debate partner, Elvis Alvarado, was homesick and Fatah faced off alone in the final round against two juniors.

“They looked like men — they were tall, and they had deep husky voices — and there was Fatah, who at that point in his life was probably 80 pounds soaking wet,” Singh recalled. “He just destroyed them. It was amazing.”

Fatah is studious but far from humorless, Elvis said; he is known at New Mission as the creator of catchphrases that serve as all-purpose answers to any question, such as “You know the rules.”

Read more: From refugee camp to top of his class

Source: The Boston Globe