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

by Lopez Lomong

  These thoughts had barely had time to bounce into my brain before the farmer stepped over to the television. He flipped the switch. The black, white, and gray images disappeared. “Five more shillings,” he said. The local Kenyans and my friends dug in their pockets. Everyone had more money except me. When the farmer came to me with his hand held out, I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “No money, no Olympics.”

  “Okay,” I said. My friends all looked at me with sad expressions on their faces. However, no one dug down and paid five shillings for me. That was fine. I smiled. “I’ll see you guys back at camp.”

  Outside, night had fallen. The stars shone overhead, bright and beautiful. I started back on that long, familiar walk toward my tent. The trail we ran every day came close to the farmer’s house. Even in the dark, I knew where I was and how to get back to where I needed to go. I walked along in the night, staring up at the night sky. The image of Michael Johnson standing on that platform, the letters USA across his chest, weeping openly and without shame, flashed through my head. For a man to react to winning a race in such a manner told me that this had been more than a race. Those letters on his chest and the flag he carried around the track, they had to be the key. Clearly, he was not just running for himself. The gold medal by itself was not enough to bring a real man to tears. No, this man, this man with skin like mine, ran for something bigger than himself. That had to be why he wept.

  I walked through the night, these thoughts dancing in my head. Suddenly, an idea hatched in my brain, an idea that should have struck me as ridiculous, but it did not. To me, this idea made perfect sense. In my mind’s eye I watched Michael Johnson run his race over and over again and I knew that someday, I, too, would run in the Olympics. I did not know how, but I knew I would. I now had a dream that changed the course of my life: I would be an Olympian. Moreover, I wanted to run with those same three letters across my chest: USA. I wanted to be like Michael Johnson.

  The next day came just like every day before in Kakuma. I went off to school in the morning, working out my lessons with a stick in the sand. At noon, school let out, which meant it was now time to run one lap around the camp, then spend the rest of the day on the soccer field. The day may have been like every day before, but I was now different. I took off running my thirty kilometer lap, but my mind was not on soccer. With every step, I saw Michael Johnson; I saw the Olympics; I saw myself running for the USA.

  The scenery flying past me on my run looked different as well. From the day I arrived in Kakuma, the camp defined my world. I thought I would always live here, because I never saw anyone leave. The camp kept growing bigger and bigger as more and more refugees flooded in from a never-ending civil war. Life revolved around Tuesday trash day and a brief escape from reality during church on Sundays. That’s all there was, and all there ever would be.

  Not anymore. I knew a life existed for me beyond the perimeter of Kakuma. God Himself had brought me to Kakuma. I always thought He must have had a reason for bringing me here. Now I had it. Now I knew where my destiny lay. Michael Johnson opened a wider world to me. By God’s grace, I would get there.

  EIGHT

  Writing for My Life

  The United States of America has decided to allow a limited number of you boys to leave Kakuma and go to America,” the priest announced one October Sunday less than two months after I watched Michael Johnson run in the Olympics. The priest might as well have said Jesus had thrown open the doors of heaven to us. From where I lived, the only difference between America and heaven was that I had to die to go to heaven.

  I knew all about America—at least I thought I did. The boys in the camp talked about America with the same degree of authority they used when discussing the Olympics. “Everyone eats as much food as they want,” boys said. “Anyone in America can get any job they want,” I heard. “That’s the place where all your dreams come true.”

  The occasional sight of an American in our camp only confirmed everything we thought we knew. Every American who visited the camp stood tall and clean and well fed and white and pure. We boys in the camp looked and smelled bad because we had no place to bathe. But Americans, they were white just like the pictures of Jesus I’d seen. That’s why I thought Americans must be close to God, and America must be like heaven. Every boy in the camp dreamed of going to America someday, but we knew that was one dream that had no chance of coming true.

  Until now.

  A real live American stood up to fill us in on the details. “Thirty-five hundred boys from Kakuma will be allowed to move to the United States permanently,” he said in English, which was translated into Swahili by one of the camp directors. “Anyone can apply to be one of the thirty-five hundred. You must write an essay in English that tells your story. We will accept essays for the next three weeks, but obviously, the sooner you turn yours in, the better. Once we receive your essays, we will read through them and make our selections.”

  “You can bring your essays here to the church,” the priest added. “We will send them on to the American embassy.”

  We sang a final song. Church let out. We boys went nuts. “America … America … America …” Everyone started talking about America. Questions flew around the room. Everyone asked one another the same things: “Did the mzungu [white man] say what I thought he said?” “How did they find out about us in America?” “Do you think this is real?” “Who will get to go?” Every boy wanted to be one of the thirty-five hundred. If they were like me, they felt they had to be one of the thirty-five hundred.

  Thirty-five hundred. The number sounded so high yet so small at the same time. When I ran my lap around the camp each day, there were boys as far as the eye could see. I never thought of trying to count them all, but I knew thirty-five hundred was a drop in the bucket compared to so many lost boys. And I’d heard other boys’ stories. Everyone had lived through hell. Many of these boys had lived through hell far longer than me. You couldn’t even call a lot of them boys anymore.

  Civil war broke out in Sudan in 1983. The first group of lost boys escaped in a large group a short time later. They went to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. However, when the government changed there, the boys had to flee for their lives once again. Perhaps as many as a thousand died on the journey. Many drowned or were eaten by crocodiles when they crossed the Gilo River from Ethiopia into Kenya. The rest of the lost boys were like me, boys who escaped Sudan as the war went on and on and on. Some had been kidnapped and escaped. Others fled when their villages were destroyed by bombs or soldiers. All of us had suffered incredible hardship. How could the United States choose which of us to give new lives, and which to leave behind to live forever in Kakuma?

  “So, Lopez,” a friend said, calling me by the nickname the boys gave me in Kakuma, “are you going to write an essay?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Isn’t everyone?”

  “I don’t know English well enough to write a whole essay. Do you?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and smiled. “I won’t let a little thing like that get in my way.”

  And I didn’t.

  The moment the church service ended, I went back to my tent to pray. “Father, I cannot write anything that stands out from all the other boys in this camp. But I trust You. If You want me in America, I know You will lift up my essay and make it stand out. You will take me to America, not this essay.”

  Outside my tent, boys ran and played like any other day, only today they talked about America instead of the Olympics or soccer. I did not have time to join in. I wanted to turn in my essay as soon as possible, before the thirty-five hundred spots filled up. But what do I say? I wondered. The man said we were to tell our story. My story began at church. Suddenly it occurred to me that it was not a coincidence that I heard of this opportunity to go to America while at church. I could have heard it anywhere. The mzungu might have come to our school on Monday and announced it there. Instead he came on Sunday, to church, to my church. Nearly ten years earlier I w
ent to church one Sunday expecting to worship God, but I ended up in a prison camp. Now God had opened a door to America during church. “God, this has to be part of Your plan,” I prayed.

  Before I could start writing, I had to come up with a pencil and paper. Even after ten years in Kakuma, I still did my school lessons in the dirt with a stick. Pencil and paper were hard to find for school, but not for this essay. Most of the boys in my section of the camp knew me. We all looked out for one another. As soon as word got out that I needed pencil and paper, one of the sponsored boys offered me both.

  Back in my tent, I sat down and composed my thoughts. “Ten years ago, I woke up early to go to church with my mother and father,” I wrote in Swahili. “We were praying when trucks filled with soldiers came up. The soldiers pointed guns at us. They ordered us to lie down on the ground. I lay down next to my mother. She wrapped her arm around me. A soldier pulled her arm away and picked me up. He threw me in the back of a truck along with all the other boys and girls from my village. They took us to a prison camp.”

  Memories rushed back. I remembered details of the day I was taken that I had not thought about for a very long time. It was as though I was back there, reliving the whole thing again. I saw the trucks. I heard the soldiers. I felt the hot truck bed on my bare legs.

  “The soldiers blindfolded me in the back of the truck and threw me to the ground. They put my hand on the back of another boy. They marched us in a line. They beat many of the boys. I heard them scream in pain. The line stopped. Someone pulled the blindfold off my face. He pushed me into a hut filled with boys.” I wrote about the smell and how boys died every day.

  “Three boys and I escaped through a hole in the fence one night.” I remembered how the door did not squeak and how the soldiers guarding us did not notice us crawling across the compound. “We crawled through the fence. Then we started running. We ran for our lives for three days across the desert.” The more I wrote, the more details I remembered. I could not write down everything that happened. I only had one sheet of paper, and I was supposed to write an essay, not a book. Yet I somehow knew exactly what to include and what details to leave out.

  I kept writing and writing and writing. Words spilled across the page. I was not nervous. I did not wonder what the Americans would think of my story or whether they would find it strong enough to select me as one of the thirty-five hundred. Sitting in my tent, paper and pencil in hand, I did not write my story for the Americans. This essay was a prayer I wrote for God alone, a prayer I hoped He would answer.

  Once I finished writing my story in Swahili, I read it over and then read it over again. I changed a few things here and there, but not very much. I would like to say the first draft was perfect, but I had no way of knowing if it was any good. This was my story, in my voice. Unfortunately, my voice only came out in Swahili. The Americans did not want Swahili. They would only accept English. I knew I could not translate my essay by myself.

  I went to my friends, my family of boys who lived with me in my tent. “Guys, I need some help,” I said. Over the next few days, writing for my life became a community project.

  My friends gathered around me while I sat at a makeshift table. I laid out a brand-new sheet of paper. A friend loaned me a pen with which to write in English. I did not want to turn in a scribbled mess. This essay had to look as good as it sounded. The former was much easier than the latter.

  “Okay, Lopez, what do you have?” one asked.

  “Tafadhali Mungu ni saidye.”

  “Do you know how to say that in English?”

  “I think,” I said. I took out my pen. “Please, God, help me,” I wrote.

  “What’s next?”

  “Wakati nilikuwa mtoto mdogo, wajeishi walikuja wa kanisa yetu boma ya Kimotong nchi yetu wa Sudani. Wanabeba bunduki kubwa.” I stared at it for a moment. “I have no idea how to put this into English,” I said.

  One of the boys pointed at the first sentence. “I have it. When I was child little, soldiers came,” he said in English. Then in Swahili, “Uh, what’s the next word?”

  “Village,” another said in English.

  “How do you spell that?” I asked.

  “V-i-l-l-a-g-e”

  I hesitated.

  “It looks like this,” he said, and drew a v in the dirt with his hand.

  “Right,” I said. Carefully, I penned the English words as best I could. “Please, God, help me. When I was child little, soldiers came church ours village Kimotong my country Sudan.”

  “Kuchukwa watoto wadogo kufundishya jinzi wa wajeishi. Mimi ni lukua na wao,” became, “Carry with them guns big. Take children young teach become a soldier. I am among them … We went to fence. We ran through bush dark three days …”

  Our community English project left much to be desired, but it was the best we could do. Over the next few hours my friends called out English words from my Swahili. More than once we debated a word for a while before landing on the best translation. It seems very funny to me now to think that I could not even read the essay I was writing. I had no idea what most of the English words meant, but I trusted my family.

  After we finished my essay, we helped other boys turn their Swahili into English as they wrote for their lives too. “Someday,” I said, “we will all be in America, with jobs and food, and it will be great.” The thought made us work that much harder to perfect our essays. This was our chance at freedom, our only chance. “Oh God, hear my prayer,” I prayed. “Let my cry come to You.”

  I took my essay to church the next Sunday. “To You, God,” I prayed as I dropped it in the bin near the front of the church as an offering. If all the boys were like me, God received a lot of offerings that morning. The bin was filled to the top with hundreds of essays. I walked back into the crowd and found a seat on one of the homemade benches. The music began. We stood to sing, but my mind was not on the songs. I stared at the bin. With so many desperate boys from which to choose, how would the Americans decide who goes and who stays behind? I was glad I did not have to make that decision. If it were up to me, every boy in the camp would be on the next bus to America.

  The music stopped. The priest delivered his sermon. I could not listen. The bin of essays had my full and undivided attention. “It is up to You, God,” I prayed. “You will decide.” Yes, it was up to Him, not the Americans. God would indeed decide what was best for me. He had brought me to Kakuma with my three angels. He must have a plan for when and how I was to leave. Knowing God was in control was the only thing that allowed me to stop fixating on the bin and to go back to my tent as church ended. I knew I wrote the best essay I could possibly write. My friends and I translated it into English as best we could. I could do nothing more. The rest was up to God.

  Sunday came again. I went to church. We sang. The priest preached. At the end of the service he read a list of boys who had turned in essays. He did not say which boys would get to go to America.

  More Sundays came and went. Weeks had gone by since I dropped my essay in the bin, but still no word from the Americans. “They never intended to let us leave,” a boy said. “Do you know what people out there call us?”

  I shook my head.

  “Lost boys of Sudan. No one thinks about us. No one cares about lost boys.”

  I did not argue the point. What good would it do?

  Christmas approached, my favorite time of the year. I made plans for the chicken our tent would soon receive. My heart wasn’t in it. I found it hard to get excited about a chicken while waiting to be told if I’d get to live in America.

  The UN passed out the Christmas chickens. We had our feast and then went to church for Christmas, Jesus’ birthday, the day I became Joseph, the worker, the new man. I walked into our church. Something was different. The mzungu was back. My heart raced. He announced, “Please come forward when I read your name.”

  He called the first name. A boy went up front. They handed him an envelope. What does that mean? What is inside the envelope? Is it
good news or bad?

  More names were called. More boys went forward. More envelopes were handed out. I waited, nervous and excited. Every time the mzungu opened his mouth, my heart skipped a beat. Will my name be next? He opened his mouth. I held my breath. “Joseph Lopepe Lomong,” he said. I leaped out of my seat. I couldn’t believe my head missed the ceiling, I jumped so high. My friends clapped and patted me on the back, congratulating me. I tried to stay calm. I strolled up to the front. A worker placed a large, white envelope in my hands. I went back to my seat, my heart pounding.

  “Open it,” a friend said.

  “What does it say?” said another.

  “You’re going to America,” someone said.

  “You’re not going to America,” someone else said.

  “Open it, Lopez!” A friend nudged me.

  I clutched the envelope tightly. I could not open it in front of so many people. If it were bad news, I knew I could not control my emotions. And if it were good news … oh, the emotions would flow as well.

  The last name was called. Church let out. Excited boys with envelopes danced out; dejected boys without envelopes could hardly make their feet work. I ran out to a place where I could be alone. I pulled out the envelope. Carefully, I slid a finger under the flap. I pulled out a very official-looking document. I closed my eyes, said a quick prayer, and breathed in deep. Okay, this is it. America or Kakuma: which will it be? I opened my eyes to read my fate.

  “What?” I said. The entire thing was written in English! I could not read a single word except my name.

  I walked back to the church. One of my friends who could read and speak English well was still there. “Can you tell me what this says?” I asked.