On a recent afternoon, Acii Nancy, 19, a young woman from Uganda, looked like any other college freshman-to-be. She walked across campus in her crisp navy Boise State T-shirt, a paper bracelet from a nearby street festival around her wrist.

Her calm way and the particularly elegant version of English she speaks don't reveal the circumstances that made her life converge with that of professor Phil Kelly and brought her to Boise State.

She'll study nursing on a scholarship that's the first of its kind at Boise State - one based on Kelly's inspiration, Acii's hard work and the university's leap of faith.

When Acii was competing for her scholarship, Kelly recalled how someone asked her how she'd deal with homesickness were she to win. She looked at her lap.

"I've known great sadness. I can cope up," she answered.

The story began a couple of years ago when Kelly, a professor in the College of Education, watched "Invisible Children," a documentary about Ugandan children forced to become soldiers in a civil war that's raged for as long as Acii has been alive.

Kelly admits the film, which boasts an "MTV beat," is not a masterpiece. But it was powerful enough to inspire the creation of a child welfare foundation of the same name, and to inspire Kelly to spend his 2007 summer break in Uganda, a country of 24 million people, but a mere four traffic lights.

He taught chemistry and physics at Gulu Central High School - a school with 1,300 students and one chemistry book. He led class, science experiments drawn out on a single chalk board, and wondered how he could do more.

Somewhere, among those students, though unknown to Kelly at the time, was Acii Nancy.

Acii (she writes her family name first) lost both her parents to AIDS and lived with the only relative she had, her father's second wife, who mistreated her. With help from a mentor from the Invisible Children foundation, she became school prefect, a leadership title harking back to Uganda's years as a British colony. She was the top-scoring girl in the school in her first set of secondary exams. She persevered through the second set, though she was suffering through a bout of malaria.

When Kelly came back to the U.S., he met with university president Bob Kustra and asked for a scholarship for one Ugandan student. Kustra said yes.

A long application process and a partnership with the Invisible Children foundation determined that Acii was that student.

Kustra said approving a scholarship was easy.

"We want to remind those on our campus and in the larger community that as far away as a problem may seem, there are ways we can help. This way actually brings the person within our midst, and she becomes one of us."

Kustra hopes to create an endowment to pay for more scholarships for students like Acii.

When Acii heard she had won the scholarship, she fainted, she said. Out cold.

She will live with the Kelly family for the next two years. She's trying to get used to things, not only the profusion of traffic lights, but such things as vending machines or wading in the river. Kelly has three daughters and has already started referring to Acii as his fourth.

For the first time in her life, Acii will have her own bedroom. The Kellys found out what her favorite colors were before she came - blue, brown and cream - so her room would be ready when she got here.

Anna Webb: 377-6431