Siriki Diabate and his mother stood in the outdoor marketplace across from her home in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and watched as up to 18 people were slain in the street. He looked across at the city’s French bookstore. The owner was being beaten while products were ripped off his shelves.

The marketplace was ransacked as the scene turned into a riot. Just minutes ago, the city was as innocent as Siriki’s 10-year-old eyes. That night a law was put in place that kept everyone in Abidjan indoors after dark for at least two weeks.

The Ivory Coast was on the doorstep of a civil war that would tear the country at its seams and Siriki was growing up at the center of it.

“It was no way for a child to live,” Siriki, now 23, says wincing. “No way at all.”

Siriki has a lot of homes.

The first is Korhogo, in northern Ivory Coast. There he lived with his grandmother and sisters for the first 13 years of his life. The next is the Bronx, New York where his mother Sanogo Korotoume and sister, Djara, moved in with Siriki’s father, Souleymane 10 years ago. The most recent is Syracuse, where Siriki is a graduate assistant for the Orange football team after playing two years at middle linebacker in 2011 and 2012.

He didn’t make the NFL as a player after transferring to SU from Nassau (New York) Community College, but his ability to motivate young players at Syracuse has given him a foot inside the door of college coaching.

Every step draws him further away from the Ivory Coast, the home he thought he’d never leave. He interned with the Buffalo Bills coaching staff this past summer and during Syracuse games he sits in the booth with SU defensive coordinator Chuck Bullough. He smiles when he says he could be the first Ivorian head coach in the NFL.

“There were times along the way that I thought it may have been easier if I just stayed in the Ivory Coast and dealt with what was going on,” he said. “But then I think that I’m supposed to be here sharing with these young guys.”

And many around him don’t know what it’s taken to get there.

For kids in Korhogo, life revolved around soccer.

The daily break from class between noon and 1 p.m. was always spent on the field behind their school and rarely used for eating lunch.

Siriki and his friends built their field from scratch. They used tools from the school to cut down trees, bind together wood for goalposts at both ends of the field and maintained the grass so there wouldn’t be snakes at their feet.

“It’s all he ever talked about or wanted to do,” Djara, Siriki’s sister, said. “We would have to tie him down to do schoolwork when he was little. Just had so much energy and always wanted to play.”

But soccer couldn’t erase everything, especially when the sport was taken away from Siriki and his friends.

Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the Ivory Coast’s first president after gaining independence in 1960, died in 1993 when Siriki was 2 years old. That left the country grappling with a democratic system, creating tension between a rebel-occupied north and government-controlled south.

As the country teetered on the brink of civil war in the early 2000s, rebels regularly came to Siriki’s school, guns in hand, and made the kids go home. The children would walk in one big pack, hoping they’d be safe in numbers.

Siriki, Djara and their oldest sister Koumba lived farthest from school and walked the last leg home alone. On one walk home they heard from someone that a school in a nearby neighborhood had been blown up.

“It came to a point where it wasn’t safe to live there,” Siriki said. “But since we were in the north, we had to dodge the rebels to get to the south and try and get out. That wasn’t an easy trip.”

The whole family — Siriki, his two sisters, mother and grandmother — took bus after bus to the south, stopping for hours at a time in occupied areas and hiding their plans of fleeing the country.

They ended up at the back of a long line at the American Embassy. After waiting for eight hours Siriki was put in a room across from an interviewer. A glass window separated his old life from a new one.

How old are you?  

What is your education like?

Who are you here with?

Three questions. Three short answers.

And he — along with Djara and his mother — was granted temporary passage to the United States. Koumba and his grandmother were not, and dashed to Mali where they’d stay until the war settled years later.

His mother scrapped up enough money for three plane tickets and they left for the U.S. soon after. Siriki spoke fluent French and Dioula, their native dialect, but not a word of English. He had one outfit on his body and two others in a small duffel bag.

Siriki, Djara and Sanogo originally planned to stay no more than a week in the United States, but the war worsened and their school in Korhogo was shut down.

“They weren’t going to go back with no school,” said their father Souleymane, who moved to the Bronx in the early 1990s. “There was just no life back there at that time.”

So the Diabates settled in a Sedgwick Avenue apartment in the Bronx, with the River Park Towers — a sky-scraping two-building housing project — and the Major Deegan Expressway separating them from the Harlem River.

In the Ivory Coast there were small dirt roads, endless forests and tight-knit villages that raised children as a community. Now there was a police officer inside the front door of their building, constant highway traffic and a sign near the corner that read “No parking from 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. No standing any time.”

Shortly after moving in, Siriki walked past the projects and down to Roberto Clemente State Park, a stone’s throw from his home. What Siriki wanted was a soccer game, but the kids were either playing football on a small patch of grass or basketball on hoops with no nets. The park’s manager told him his best bet was football — a game he had never played before — since he had some muscle and speed.

When Siriki got to high school he didn’t make the team because he was out of shape. And it wasn’t until he switched to Lehman (New York) High School — a two-hour bus ride from the corner deli at the end of his street — that he got on the field as a linebacker and fullback. He attracted attention from Nassau Community College, which was close to home and affordable for his family.

Siriki was a preferred walk-on at Nassau but still had to try out with 300 players. During the tryout, he shaded over in coverage and intercepted a pass from the middle linebacker position. It caught the attention of linebackers coach Sylas Pratt, who called Siriki over to the sideline.

“What’s your name, son?” Pratt asked.

“Siriki Diabate, sir,” he answered.

“No way am I calling you that,” Pratt said. “I’m going to call you Shiki Shiki.”

The nickname stuck. Two years later when he was recruited to Syracuse by former Nassau head coach John Anselmo, the name was shortened to “Shik.”

Everything about Siriki was evolving.

No job is too big or too small.

Cameron Lynch, a starting senior linebacker who played with Siriki from 2011–12, said that Siriki is always telling SU’s linebackers that.

That was Siriki’s approach as a player. He led Nassau to an 11-0 season in 2010, was the team’s leading tackler and became an All-American and Northeast Football Conference Co-Defensive Player of the Year in the process. But he also went to the gym before practice to get a few more reps on the bench press and stayed after practice to work toward his associate’s degree.

At Syracuse, he started in two games in 2011, then 12 in 2012 when he was a co-captain and led the team to a Pinstripe Bowl victory against West Virginia. That game, his last, was at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. His dad was in attendance while the whole neighborhood watched on TV.

When the NFL Draft came and Siriki’s name wasn’t called, his dad couldn’t walk out of their apartment without someone asking where Siriki was off to next.

“Is your son a star yet?” Souleymane remembers being asked.

“No, not yet,” Souleymane answered. “He’ll get there.”

Djara and Souleymane had always known Siriki with a toothy smile accompanying almost everything he did. But when they came to his Syracuse graduation that wasn’t the case anymore, and it was as if falling short of professional football had stripped something from him.

When his playing career ended, he moved from couch to couch on South Campus, helping SU out in the weight room and on the practice field in hopes of sticking with the program as a coach.

The opportunity came, with his education visa allowing him to pursue a graduate degree in instructional design and head coach Scott Shafer offering a spot on his staff.

“I told Siriki he was always welcome when he asked me if he could come back,” said Shafer, who was SU’s defensive coordinator when Siriki first joined the team. “He’s an exceptional leader, one of the best I’ve coached, and it was a no-brainer to bring him back.”

Freshman Zaire Franklin regularly wakes up at 6 a.m. to meet up with Siriki at the Iocolano-Petty Football Complex of Manley Field House. Their conversations start on football and end up on life, family and the young linebacker’s future.

Franklin says that Siriki is easy to relate to, and makes him think about the direction he’s going in.

“It’s easy for me to wake up early for these guys,” Siriki said. “There was a time in my life when I was just grateful to wake up at all.”

And it’s that time, those memories that drive Siriki forward.

Looking past college football, the NFL and the life he is building in the U.S., he yearns to go back home. He wants to go behind the school where he once built a soccer field and start a football team. He thinks it would be hard to find an offensive or defensive line, but that he could find some good running backs and receivers right away.

Siriki hasn’t been back since he left in 2004 — complicated immigration laws, the chance of violence, among other things, have stood in between.

But he wants to see his family. He wants other kids to make the leap he has. He wants one more day, if only that, in the Ivory Coast sun.

Thriving in the U.S. isn’t the end goal. It’s a means of making his biggest dream a reality.

“I want to go back more than anything. It’s a scary, scary place. It’s terrifying some things I saw,” he said. “But it’s still home, though. It doesn’t matter how bad it was. It made me what I am today.

“Even if it’s hard to say, that place is everything to me, man.”