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

by Lopez Lomong

  The guards kept talking and laughing, and I kept crawling. No one said it, but we all knew the guards would open fire on us if they found us trying to escape. We did not care. I would rather die trying to escape than to sit and wait for death to come find me inside that prison hut.

  We crawled past the hut. I glanced up and noticed the faint outline of a fence just beyond us. It was hard to see in the dark. I do not know how my friends knew where to go. We crawled closer to the fence. Perhaps ten minutes had passed since we slipped out the hut door. My heart beat in my ears.

  Once we were right upon the fence, I saw a very small gap in the bottom of it. One of my friends climbed through the hole. I could not believe the guards couldn’t hear the clanking of the chain-link fence. However, like the squeaking door that fell silent on this night, I know God Himself was responsible for the guards not hearing us. I thought of the story in the book of Acts where angels set Peter free from prison in the middle of the night. The angel made the chains drop from Peter’s wrists and then threw open the prison gate. Peter walked right out of the prison and not one of the guards noticed. God did the same thing for me and my three angels that night.

  My friend held the fence open and motioned for me. I slipped right through. From the other side I looked back toward the hut. The glowing orange circles all seemed to be on the opposite side of the compound from us. My next friend struggled through the hole. It was so small, I don’t know how any of them made it through it. I remembered a story my mother had told me from the Bible. She told me that Jesus said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. “That’s why it is so important for us to sacrifice cows to give thanks to God,” she said. “Our cows are what make us rich.” Her words rang in my ears that night. The hole in that fence was the eye of the needle I had to pass through to be saved.

  My third friend forced himself through the hole. The moment he was through, two friends grabbed me on either side, and we ran for our lives. I moved my legs as fast as I could, trying to keep up. When I couldn’t keep up, my friends lifted me off the ground and carried me along. None of us wore shoes. Rocks cut into the soles of my feet. We kept running. Bushes suddenly appeared in front of us. We hardly slowed down. The branches reached out and slapped at my legs. Thorns tore my skin open. I barely felt a thing. We kept running. And running. And running.

  I listened for the sound of soldiers chasing after us, but all I could hear was my heart banging in my chest and my heavy breathing. My legs started to give out. Even with a friend helping me on each side, I could not keep going. One boy paused for a moment. Reaching around me, he swept me on his back and off we went. Big trees came up over us. I knew a lion or a leopard might be hiding in one, waiting for an antelope to come by. My friends didn’t even look up. They kept on running, carrying me with them.

  The forest disappeared behind us. My friend lowered me down so that I could run on my own. Tall savannah grass enveloped us. We found a game trail and ran and ran and ran. My legs gave out and I stumbled and fell. My friends helped me to my feet. “Just a little while longer, Lopepe, and we will stop to rest,” he said.

  “Okay,” I muttered. I could hardly speak.

  We ran through the tall grass. Hours had passed since we slipped through the eye of the needle, and still we ran. I do not know how we could run so far and so fast and so long. We did not run with our own strength but with strength from God. That is the only explanation.

  The sky above our heads turned from pitch-black to midnight blue. Soon the sun would be up. My friends slowed down. One took off a little ways off the path. A few moments later he came back and motioned for the rest of us. Another picked me up and carried me through the tall grass. The third boy walked behind him, fluffing up the grass behind us to hide our trail from anyone chasing us.

  The four of us collapsed on a bed of grass about fifteen or twenty yards from the trail. “Rest,” one said.

  I fell back onto the soft grass. It felt so much better than the hard hut floor. The sky grew lighter. I looked down at my legs. Dried blood covered them. One month earlier I would have cried over such a sight. Not now. Bleeding legs was a small price to pay to be free. “That way,” one of my angels said as he pointed into the distance. “Everyone lie down facing that direction.”

  “Why?” I yawned.

  “That’s the direction we will run after we rest. It is easy to get turned around out here. If we are not careful, we may end up running right back to the prison camp.”

  “I don’t ever want to see that place again,” I said.

  My angel smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You won’t.”

  I did not reply. My eyes grew very, very heavy. I fell asleep and dreamed of home.

  FOUR

  Running Home

  I woke up running. Something must have happened on my first morning of freedom before we took off running under the bright, hot, summer African sun, but I do not remember it. I opened my eyes and found myself between two of my friends, running as fast as I could go down a game trail with tall grass and an occasional acacia tree flying past us.

  My feet screamed in pain with every step, but I did not dare listen to them. Somewhere up ahead my mother waited for me. I would not slow down until I found her. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I hadn’t had anything to drink in over a day, but I didn’t complain. I had gone even longer without water when the rebel soldiers kidnapped me. If this was the price I had to pay to be free, so be it. I could do this.

  The sun pushed down on top of me, trying to shove me down to the ground. We stayed as close to the occasional tree as we could. Every small bit of shade gave me an extra spring in my step. But running under the midday sun was much harder than running the night before. I did not know how I kept going. I tried to focus on the scenery around me to take my mind off being thirsty. A herd of gazelles bounced along in the distance as if they did not have a care in the world. I wished I could run like them—then I would be home in no time.

  Our game trail took us near a hill. We ran along the side of it for a short distance before coming upon a cave. My three friends stopped at the mouth of the cave. I stopped as well. All of us struggled to catch our breath. When I saw how worn-out my angels were, I felt a little better. I was afraid I was slowing us down.

  “We won’t last long in this sun,” one said. “We ought to rest in here until the sun starts to go down.”

  The others nodded in agreement. Like me, they were too winded to speak. Eventually one of them spit out, “We need to find some water.”

  “Agreed,” the other said. “You think those gazelles we saw could have been on their way to a water hole?”

  “It’s worth checking out,” the third said. “I’ll go see what I can find.”

  I collapsed on the ground in the cave. My feet throbbed. Dirt caked with blood filled the cuts on my soles. Still, I did not complain or say anything about hurting. These throbbing feet were taking me home.

  I lay back and closed my eyes. My body ached, but my mind ran straight to home. I saw my mother standing next to the fire while my father came in from the fields, herding his cattle. My brothers played nearby. They smiled when they saw me. “Welcome home, Lopepe,” they said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  A hand shook me awake. “Here you go,” a voice said. I opened my eyes. The boy who had gone off in search of water held what appeared to be a rolled-up banana leaf in front of me. “Drink,” he said. He held the leaf to my mouth and tipped it back. I’ve never tasted anything as cool and wonderful as that drink of water. One of the other two boys then took off. When he returned, the third left. Both brought me back more water.

  We stayed in the cave the rest of the day. I slept off and on the entire time. When the shadows outside grew long, we took off. We’d only gone a short way when my stomach started growling. It had been a long time since our last meal of soggy sorghum mixed with sand. My stomach growled so loudly that the boys
on either side of me laughed. About that time we passed trees with low-hanging fruit that looked sort of like plums. We stopped long enough to eat our fill. Then we took off again.

  The fact that we found both food and water just when we needed it did not strike me as remarkable at the time. Nor did I find it amazing the next day and the day after that when it happened again. My mother had taught me the story of the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness for forty years. “God gave them manna in the morning, and when Moses hit a rock with his stick, water came out,” she told me. What God did for the Israelites in the Bible He did for me and my friends in our wilderness trek. I may have been far from home, but He had not abandoned me. I never doubted that for a moment.

  The sky grew dark. Stars came out. We ran and then we ran some more. The moon rose. We came upon a road that we had to cross. Three of us hid in the grass while one of my angels crept close to the road to look for coming cars. Once he was certain we would not be seen, we dashed across as quickly as possible. The last boy used a tree branch to wipe away our footprints. He did the same thing every time we crossed roads over the next couple of days. We crossed several, but we never saw any car or truck. For that matter, we never saw any signs of another human being. It was as though we were the only four people in this little corner of South Sudan.

  We ran through the night, stopping only long enough to catch our breath or grab a drink of water when we happened upon an oasis. The next morning we ran until the sun got too hot to continue. Only then did we find a shady place to hide and rest. Once again, we lay down facing the direction we needed to go when we started running again.

  I felt miserable. The pains in my feet and legs had spread to my entire body. Even so, I didn’t have any trouble going to sleep. The moment my body hit the ground, I passed out. I didn’t stir until one of the angels nudged me and said, “It’s time to get going.”

  The sun comes up at six every morning in equatorial east Africa and goes down exactly twelve hours later. We didn’t wait for it to go down before taking off. Just like the day before, we started running when the shadows grew long and the sun was low in the sky.

  The next night of running was a carbon copy of the one before and the one before that. The terrain never changed. From late afternoon into night and on into the next morning, we ran through an endless sea of savannah grass punctuated by islands of acacia trees. We stayed in the bush the best we could, although there were times we had to sprint out in the open to cross a road. When we did, we stayed as low to the ground as possible and ran as fast as our legs would carry us.

  By the time the sky turned light, our legs did not want to move. All four of us were starting to break down. I wanted to stop. I needed to stop. I cannot describe the pain shooting up from the soles of my feet with every step I took. Running through broken glass could not have hurt more. My friends struggled to keep going as well. But we could not stop. Not yet. I knew if I sat down, I would not get back up.

  I’m not sure you can call what we did at this point running, but we tried. Head down, one step in front of another as fast as I could move, I pressed on. Home had to be just ahead. I felt like I was running in a fog. Unlike the first night, the other boys did not have the strength to put me on one of their backs and carry me. I had to carry myself on my own two feet.

  The tall grass gave way to open fields. We had no choice but to cross. We could not turn back.

  Suddenly, we came upon a tin-roofed building. A couple of trucks were parked next to it, along with a car. I heard voices, men’s voices, but I could not understand what they said. They did not speak Buya, the language of my tribe, or any language I’d heard in my life. My mind was still trying to make sense of the words flying through the air when I saw them: soldiers. However, these soldiers wore real uniforms, not the worn-out rags of the rebels. They could not be the ones hunting us. However, we could not take that chance. “Down on the ground,” one of my friends said.

  But it was too late. The soldiers saw us. They bolted in our direction. My friends and I looked around desperately, but there was no place for us to hide. The soldiers came closer. I wanted to run, but my legs gave out. I fell to the ground, and I could not get back up. The soldiers rushed upon us. I looked at my friends. They could not move either. We were caught. After three nights of running through the wilderness, we were caught.

  Three or four soldiers came up and started firing off questions, one after another. We could not understand a word they said. One of my friends said to them, “We were taken by rebels. Please, we just want to go home.” They did not understand him any better than we understood them. The questions kept coming. The four of us had to look silly, sitting there, unable to communicate. The questions stopped. The soldiers talked among themselves. They pointed at us, made motions in the distance, and then talked some more.

  However, they did not use a threatening tone with us. We had been arrested, but these were not Sudanese rebels or Sudanese army soldiers. The whole time we thought we were running toward our village, we were in fact running straight to Kenya. These soldiers were Kenyan border guards. And they knew who we were. They’d come to recognize the railthin build and the rags on our backs as distinguishing marks of boys escaping the civil war in Sudan.

  Another soldier came up with a bucket. He dipped out a ladle of water for me. I tried to stand up, but I could not. No matter how hard I tried, my legs refused to work. He lowered the ladle down to me and let me drink my fill. The other boys drank their fill of water as well. Another man handed us a small dish with some corn in it. I looked at it very closely. There wasn’t any sand mixed in. I scooped part of it up and shoved it into my pocket. The rest I gulped down.

  “It’s not home, Lopepe,” one of my friends said, “but at least we are safe. Don’t worry. We will get you to your mother somehow.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  I looked closely at the faces of my three angels. Each of them looked like a runner who falls across the finish line, completely exhausted, with nothing left to give. That’s what the Kenyan border felt like. It felt like stumbling across the finish line of the longest, most grueling race in the world. I can only imagine how I looked to them. My clothes, my Sunday best shirt and shorts just a few weeks earlier, were now shredded. What little material remained was caked with dirt and blood.

  A soldier motioned for us to follow him. My friends managed to walk toward a truck. I scooted along on my rear after them. It was the best I could do. The truck looked similar to those the rebels threw us into when they invaded our church. However, its paint looked much newer. The bed was clean, as was the canopy overhead. The soldiers lifted us into the back. When we sat down, no one closed the canopy tight around the back.

  The truck took off down the road. Now that we were in Kenya, the road was smooth and paved. Air flowed through the truck, which was a welcome relief from the heat. “Where do you think they are taking us?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” one of my three friends replied, “but it is not back to the rebel camp.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “The road,” he said. “It’s too smooth.”

  I drifted in and out of sleep as the truck swayed along down the road. I awoke completely when it slowed then stopped. Outside the truck I saw a sign with letters I did not recognize. I did not know it, but the sign said “UNHCR”—that is, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The driver of the truck walked over toward a very different-looking building. It was not made of mud like the huts in my village. A man came out of the building. My eyes grew wide at the sight of him. I’d never actually seen a person like this, although he looked a lot like a picture I once saw in church.

  This man with the white skin must be next to God, I thought, because he looks like Jesus! This was how I was introduced to Kakuma, the refugee camp that was to be my world for the next ten years.

  FIVE

  Kakuma

  Life in my village of Kimo
tong is nearly the same today as it was hundreds of years ago. Most of the houses have mud walls and a grass roof. Women in our village fetch water from a nearby river. Indoor plumbing remains the stuff of science fiction in Kimotong, as do electricity and computers and television. Everyone in our village feeds their families through farming, but the farms are nothing like they are in the United States and Europe. As I mentioned, my father uses a long pole to break up the soil on our farm, as does every other farmer across this part of Africa. We shove the seeds in the ground by hand, and we harvest our grain the same way. We don’t have a plow to hitch to an ox, much less a tractor or a combine to drive.

  My only glimpse of the modern world came when I caught sight of a passenger airplane flying high in the sky. I did not know these planes carried people. All I knew was that they flew much higher than those that dropped bombs on nearby villages. A glimpse of one up in the top of the sky, silently spitting out a trail of clouds, left me staring wide-eyed, my mouth hanging open. “How can something fly so high?” I asked my dad.

  “I do not know, Lopepe,” he said. “But one day your mother and I will send you to school, where you will learn the answers to all your questions.”

  We did not have a school in our village. Neither my mother nor father could read or write. Very few people in our village could. A few lucky families in other villages scraped together enough money to send their children to a boarding school in Kenya, but the rest of us were out of luck in terms of getting an education. I knew my parents dreamed of sending me and my brothers and sister to school, but it was an impossible dream. No one in our village could afford such a luxury.

  When the Kenyan border guards dropped off me and my three friends at the UN refugee camp, I wondered if this might have been the school my father talked about. Kakuma offered classes that any boy in the camp could attend. I learned about the school not long after I arrived. I learned lots of things those first few weeks. First and foremost, I learned what it meant to be a refugee. From the moment I stepped into Kakuma, I became a boy without a country. A refugee camp is a kind of no-man’s-land. No one lives there by choice. You end up in places like Kakuma when you have no better option. Everyone who lived there just wanted to go home.