Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey From the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games

by Lopez Lomong

  I did not plan on doing any jumping or bouncing today, but I still planned on having fun. Relax and enjoy this moment, I reminded myself. I stayed just to the outside of the runner in third, leaving myself plenty of room to maneuver in case someone in front of me tripped and fell. I did not want someone else’s mistake to take me down.

  Back in Flagstaff, I had lots of people who went out of their way to keep me from tripping over myself. Professor Hales, my academic adviser, had me come into his office anytime I found myself getting frustrated under my class load. He sounded a lot like my mom. “You can do this,” he told me over and over. Then he helped me plot a strategy to get through whatever had me overwhelmed. One of my Hotel Restaurant Management professors, Wally Rande, took me under his wing. He made sure I understood the material. He and Professor Hales used to listen to me go on about my crazy dreams of going to the Olympics and building a resort in South Sudan. Most important, they kept me on course. They became my family in Flagstaff. I could not have survived there without them.

  I crossed the start line and began lap three, the lap where you put yourself in position to strike. We went along at a minute-a-lap pace for the first couple of laps, which is very fast but not too fast to maintain. I stayed less than half a second behind the leader. Fatigue starts to build in the third lap. Feet grow heavy. Legs weaken. I stayed focused on running my race. I ran relaxed over the first two laps. I kept myself in a safe position, avoiding the bunch-ups that often come in these races. Now I prepared my mind to strike. I thought back to watching Michael Johnson run in the 2000 Olympics. Head steady, arms pumping, legs flying. Today is my day, I told myself. Run your race, and you will win.

  I stayed loose but focused through the third lap. We crossed the start line. A bell rang out. The first lap does not matter. The second lap is all about positioning. Lap three is when you prepare to strike. And lap four? Lap four is “Help me, God!”

  Right into the curve we ran. Wait for it … wait for it … I told myself. The leader through the first three laps started to fade. Leo Manzano, the 1,500 meter indoor champion, moved into the lead. He’d run in the second position on laps two and three, with me right behind him. He sped up. I quickened my pace to stay close. I felt someone moving up on my outside shoulder. I moved out just enough to keep myself from getting boxed in.

  Just a little bit more, I said to myself as we moved toward the back straightaway. Up ahead was the three hundred meter mark. The moment my feet crossed it, I started my kick. I darted into second. Up ahead, Leo Manzono sprinted hard. My legs felt strong through the final curve. “Save your energy for the final one hundred meter sprint,” Coach had told me. We came out of the curve. The crowd roared, but I did not hear them. All I could hear was the rush of the wind past my ears and my heart banging in my chest.

  I pushed myself as hard as I could. Manzano pushed himself as well. Fifty meters to go. He stayed one step ahead of me. I sprinted with everything within me. I moved to the outside. At the thirty meter mark I pulled nearly even with Manzano. A dead heat. At twenty meters I pulled just ahead. I never saw him again. Head up, eyes focused on the finish line, I ran as hard as I had ever run in my life for the win. I cruised through the finish line, took a few steps, punched the stopwatch on my wrist, then collapsed on the track in joy. I looked up at the heavens and made the sign of the cross. “Thank You, God. Thank You. May You multiply this gift You have given me more and more.” My prayer had to do with far more than running.

  I got up and shook Leo Manzano’s hand. “Great race,” he said.

  “You too.” The third place finisher came over and shook my hand as well.

  A CBS television camera came over to me. I could hardly contain my excitement. Now I understood why Michael Johnson cried after winning the Olympic gold in his last race. “Lopez, congratulations. You ran an incredible race,” the reporter said.

  “Thank you,” I said. Then I looked into the camera and said, “I told you, Mom. Thank you for the opportunity.”

  Far away, in a living room in Tully, New York, my mom wept. We shared this moment even though we were thousands of miles apart.

  Later I learned that four runners in my final finished with times under 3:38. For a collegiate race, that is a blistering pace.

  After my championship race, the United States Track Team invited me to run for the United States in the Pan American Games in Rio, Brazil. I could represent the United States because a couple of weeks after the NCAA Championships another dream came true: I became a United States citizen on July 4, 2007. However, I decided not to run in the Pan Am Games. Someone else contacted me with a better offer, one for which I had waited seventeen years.

  EIGHTEEN

  Family Reunion

  I saw my biological mother for the first time since I was six while sitting in my dorm at Northern Arizona University. My friend Melissa Kiehlbaugh had just returned from another of her trips to Kenya. She and I got to know one another a year earlier when Melissa approached me in the student union and asked if I was from Kenya. At the time, I was a little suspicious. Who was this little white girl who came up and started talking to me out of the blue? Then she spoke a few words in Swahili, and I was like, Who is this little white girl?

  Melissa and I became fast friends. That first day I told her my story, including details about my biological mother and father. By this time my mother lived in Kenya with my brothers I had never met, Peter and Alex. My mom and dad in New York sent my parents money every month, which allowed my brothers to go to school in Kenya. On her last trip to Kenya, Melissa took photographs of me to show my mother. And while she was there, she took pictures of my mother for me.

  That is how I was able to see my mother after all those years, while sitting in my dorm room in Flagstaff, Arizona. Melissa opened up her laptop, clicked a few buttons, and there was a familiar face I did not remember. I ran over to the mirror and looked closely at myself. I could see my mother in me! I hugged Melissa so tight that her eyes nearly popped out of her head. “You are now my sister,” I said. “You brought my mother back to me. I’ve heard her voice, but now I can see her! That makes you more than a friend. It makes you my sister.”

  Two years later my phone rang. “This is Mary Carillo with HBO’s Real Sports,” a woman said. “Our producers watched you win the 1500 in the NCAA Championships and were intrigued by your story. We would like to do a feature on you, if you are interested.”

  “Of course, yes. Thank you,” I said. Anytime anyone asked me to tell my story, I accepted the offer. Running gave me a platform to talk about South Sudan and the lost boys. I had to use it. I assumed a crew from HBO would fly out to Arizona, ask a few questions, and shoot some footage of me running. Mary Carillo had something much bigger in mind.

  A few weeks after the initial phone call, I boarded a plane in Phoenix bound for New York’s JFK Airport. It was the same airport into which I’d flown six years earlier when I came to America from Kenya. Mary met me at the airport along with one of her producers. The three of us boarded a plane bound for London. I used my new United States passport for the very first time. While that may not sound like a big deal to most people, it was to me. The last time I boarded a plane in JFK, I was a lost boy carrying a bag of papers and no luggage. Now I flew as a very proud American. In London we boarded another plane. Eight hours later I walked off a Jetway and into a place I had not seen in six years. We were back in Kenya. Mary Carillo and HBO planned to take me to meet my mother.

  Although I wanted to see my mother as quickly as possible, after twenty hours of travel across eleven time zones, I needed a good night’s sleep first. A film crew was to meet with us in the morning and take us to my mother’s house. HBO put me in a nice hotel for the night, much nicer than the dorm at the Boys’ Center in Juja where I lived for six months. Back then I thought Nairobi had to look and sound and smell just like America. Now I knew better.

  My mind raced when I lay down and tried to sleep. No one told my mother I was coming to s
ee her. She would not know until I walked in her door. Lying in the dark, the sounds of Nairobi echoing outside, I wondered how she would react when she saw me. The first time we talked, she did not believe it was me because I was no longer a little boy. Melissa showed her photographs of me on her last visit. I knew my mother did not expect to see a little boy any longer. However, I did not know what she would think of me, her long-lost son.

  I also thought of the rest of my family I’d left behind so long ago. My two brothers, Abraham and John, and my sister, Susan, still lived in Sudan. After I was kidnapped, my parents hid them in caves at night to protect them from the rebel soldiers. My parents, along with all the other parents in the area, stopped bringing their children to church, or practically anywhere else. If rebels wanted large groups of children to take all at once, they had to look elsewhere. My dad also remained in Sudan. He worked the farm to provide for the family, while my mother stayed with Peter and Alex in Juja. When I was a boy, only the wealthiest families sent their children to Kenya for school. Now my family was wealthy, thanks to the $200 my American family sent them every month. Long ago that seemed like a great deal of money.

  Morning came. The camera crew arrived. I was up early, waiting for them. The day felt like my birthday, Christmas, the Fourth of July, and every other holiday all rolled into one. “This has to be what Joseph felt like the day his father arrived from Canaan,” I told the camera crew. Like me, Joseph in the Old Testament was taken away from his family as a boy. He endured years of hardship, first as a slave then in a prison. Everyone assumed he was dead. Later, God not only set him free but showed him that He planned to use all the bad that had happened to him for good. God did the same thing for me. Years after he received his new life, Joseph had a family reunion with his father whom he never thought he would see again. Now I knew exactly how Joseph felt. The two of us were connected by more than a name.

  We loaded into a Toyota Land Rover and drove from the hotel to Juja, eighteen miles away. On my first trip to Juja in 2001, I thought it was a very nice, modern place. In comparison to Kakuma, it was. My American eyes saw it very differently. My mother’s neighborhood has no electricity and no running water. Women walked down the street carrying five-gallon jerricans filled with water. Later I learned all the water had to be boiled before it could be used for anything.

  A few blocks from my mother’s apartment house, people took notice of our vehicle. Americans always create a stir in Juja, especially Americans flanked by camera crews. The driver slowed down as a group of children ran toward our car. “Wait a minute!” I said. “I recognize those boys. Stop the car.” The car stopped. Children jumped on the running boards and reached into the windows. I leaned out and called over to two boys standing just to the side of the road. “I know you,” I said. “You are my brothers!” I motioned for them to come over to me. They did, but I could tell from the looks on their faces they had no idea what was going on. They came because of the television cameras, not because of me. I didn’t care. I knew who they were, and that was enough. I leaned out the window and pulled one over close to me. “How are you doing, buddy? I’m your brother, Lopez.” My brothers did not speak English. I am sure they wondered who this crazy American was, although our mother had a photograph of me that I was sure the boys had seen.

  I jumped out of the car. Mary followed. “These are my brothers, Peter and Alex,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Mary said. The two boys stayed close to me, but not too close. They were still unsure of exactly who or what I was.

  We were close enough now to my mother’s apartment that I decided to walk. Cameramen walked backward in front of me as if I were some sort of big celebrity. Mary and the HBO producer fell in behind me. The farther we walked, the more the buzz around us grew. Children ran to their houses, then came back dragging along their parents. Soon we had a full parade moving down the dirt streets near where my mother lived.

  I turned a corner. The street became much narrower. Houses built of mud bricks rose up on either side. People danced along beside me. Word was out: the lost boy had come home! The dead boy was back from the grave. The party had started already.

  The parade stopped. The sea of people around me parted. All eyes turned to the woman standing in a doorway. That’s when I saw her. “Mama,” I called out to the face I recognized from Melissa’s photographs. I’d stared at that photograph so long and so close that I knew every line. “Mama, it’s me, Lopez.”

  “Lopepe!” she screamed. I rushed over to her, but her friends and relatives got in my way. I hugged her friends while pushing my way to my mother. She reached up to me and hugged me tight around my neck. Seventeen years had passed since the soldier ripped me out of her arms, seventeen very long years in which we’d both given up on one another as dead.

  “Here, here, here,” she called out in Buya. She took out some fermented flour and sprinkled it around my neck in a circular motion. In Sudan, this ceremony expresses great joy. I kneeled down to make it easier for her to reach my neck. All around us, people clapped and cheered.

  “What’s going through your mind right now?” Mary asked me.

  “I’m speechless,” I said. “I mean, this is my family … unbelievable.” When I was a small boy alone in Kakuma, I dreamed of this moment. I soon found I had to give up this dream if I was to survive life in the refugee camp. Still, a faint hope that my mother and father might someday come and find me never completely went away. When they never did, I assumed they were dead. I looked up at my mother and tried to memorize the scene. I never wanted to forget this resurrection moment. I dreamed of this day, and now my dream had come true.

  My mother finished the flour ceremony. She jumped up and ran out into the crowd. I watched as she jumped up and down and did the Sudanese call of joy. “Aiee, aiee, aiee, aiee,” she sang as she hopped up and down several times. Then she turned around in a circle three times, her hand on the back of her head. Finally, she charged over to me and pulled me into a tight embrace one more time. This was her dance of joy.

  The crowd on the street grew even larger. My mother pulled me into the house and back into the apartment. The crowds stayed outside. People stood at the window and looked in. My mother and I went into the small apartment bedroom, adobe walls around us, a concrete floor beneath us. I sat down next to my mother. Other relatives crowded into the room near us. I sat there, staring at her and she at me. I tried to speak, but no words could come out. Instead, sixteen years of emotion spilled out of me. The two of us sat there, holding one another, crying both tears of joy for the moment and sorrow for the years we’d lost. My Sudanese mother and her American son reunited at long last. “Katali, katali, katali,” she repeated over and over again. That is, “happy, happy, happy.” I felt the same way.

  Later that day I broke out another surprise for my family. I showed them my race from the NCAA championships on a portable DVD player. Televisions were no more common for my family than they were for me when I lived in Kakuma. A television so small was unbelievable to them. They gathered around as I started the race footage. I gave them a play-by-play in Swahili. CBS’s American commentators did not make much sense to my mother, brothers, aunts, and uncles. Throughout the entire race, my mother patted her chest with her right hand. When I passed Manzano with twenty meters to go, she raised her arms in the air. When I crossed the finish line to win the race, she smiled from ear to ear. Then she heard a word on the screen she understood quite well. In the interview immediately after the race, I said, “Mom, thank you for this opportunity.”

  “For you, Mother,” I said. She hugged me tight. My words made tears flow down the faces of two mothers on opposite sides of the world.

  When evening came, I went back to my hotel in Nairobi. My mother did not want to let me go. “I will return in the morning,” I told her. She grabbed hold of me and hugged me so tight I thought a bone might break. “I promise, Mother, tomorrow. I will see you again tomorrow. I do not go back to America for two weeks.”
Reluctantly, she let me go.

  The next day HBO had a surprise for me. My father arrived at my mother’s home. HBO flew him from Sudan to Nairobi just to see me. He’d never been on an airplane before. Like me, he finally got to ride in one of the planes the two of us used to watch fly far overhead. Looking at my father was like looking at the future me in a mirror. We embraced in the street. Then my father looked at me and asked, “Where did you come from?”

  I laughed. “Far away in America.” I knew he did not understand. When you have lived in the same small corner of the world your entire life, you assume everywhere is nearby. He must have wondered why it had taken me so long to come home. After all, we’d talked on the phone for four years now. America must be very far away if it took me four years to return from there. It took most of the two weeks I was there just to explain how I had to go back to America. Both my mother and father expected me to stay with them forever.

  Once I convinced them I had unfinished work I had to do in America, my father said to me, “I know you are with good people now. You are safe. So I will let you return to America, but first we have some unfinished work of our own we must complete.”

  The dream I found myself in was about to become even more surreal. I was about to go home.

  NINETEEN

  Back from the Grave

  My father had unfinished business in our home village. I had a plane to catch. “I must show the village you are alive,” he said. “And I must make you alive again.” My Buya was very rusty. I did not fully understand the second part of what he said. I tried to talk him out of his plan, but he refused to take no for an answer. It wasn’t that I did not want to see my home village. I did, very much, but I didn’t think I had enough time to go all the way to Kimotong, then make it back to Nairobi before my flight home.