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

by Lopez Lomong

  I followed Mom and Dad to the back of the house. Dad opened a shed door, revealing a sight like no other. In the camp, we played soccer every day with a ball made of rags. We used to joke about what it would be like to play with a real inflatable ball. Aid workers brought us real balls from time to time, but they did not last long in the heat of the camp. Or maybe they did not last because we played soccer all day every day. And now, inside the doors of the shed in the back of Mom and Dad’s house, were enough soccer balls for a year in Kakuma. “We heard you liked to play soccer. Hope these work out for you,” Dad said.

  My jaw dropped to the ground. In the Bible, the children of Israel dreamed of a promised land that flowed with milk and honey. I found myself in a promised land that flowed with bicycles and soccer balls. How did I get here? I wondered. Thirty-six hours earlier I was a poor kid, a lost boy of Sudan with one pair of pants, one shirt, and one pair of shoes. Now I found myself surrounded by riches unlike anything I ever dared dream about.

  “Not sure if you play basketball, but we have a few balls for you if you want to pick it up,” Dad said. Then he pointed to the fishing poles and the Jet Ski and the other sporting equipment in the shed. He said something about teaching me to use these things, but I did not understand what he said. My mind was too fixated on the multiple soccer balls sitting there, waiting for me to use them. All this was too good to be true. I knew I did not belong in this place. The only question was, how long would it take for these nice people to figure out a mistake had been made and send me on my way?

  “Would you like to see the house?” Mom asked. The question blew me away. This shed, this small barn, was bigger than the houses I knew in Kakuma. I thought I would spread my sleeping mat in the barn and live there. There was more to see? My mind could not take it all in.

  We walked across the greenest grass I’d ever seen to the back door of the house. “Excuse the mess,” Mom said. “This is the laundry room.” Back in Kakuma our laundry room consisted of a five-gallon bucket. In America, laundry rooms have large machines that do the wash, but so much more. Stacked on shelves on either side of the room were packages of food and bottles of Coca-Cola. I thought I was dreaming. I’d had my first soda some thirty hours earlier in the Nairobi airport, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. Apparently Mom and Dad liked it as well. What did I ever do to deserve to be in such a place?

  Mom and Dad kept walking, so I did my best to keep up. “This is the kitchen,” Mom said. “The fridge is over there and the pantry over there.” The next room they called the grandma room, which was the spare bedroom. “And this is the living room,” she said. The television in that room caught my eye. The wires behind it did not connect to a car battery. The screen was much larger than the little black-and-white set on which I watched Michael Johnson run.

  “Let’s head upstairs to your room. You have to be tired after such a long trip,” Mom said.

  “My room?” I said.

  “Of course,” Mom said. “Where did you think you would sleep?”

  I didn’t dare answer. Mom and Dad should have known the answer. They were so nice, but apparently so clueless. Why would they ever think a lost boy like me belonged in their home? I decided to enjoy this place while I could until everyone came to their senses and set things right.

  We walked up a set of stairs, then down a hallway. “This is Rob’s room,” Mom said, pointing toward a doorway on my right. “Our room is just down the hall. And this,” she said, pointing into a room that was roughly the same size as the tent where I’d lived with ten other boys for the past ten years, “is your room.”

  “For me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I followed Mom and Dad into the room. Outside, the sky grew dark. “Your bathroom is right through this door,” Dad said. “You know how to use a flush toilet, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. They had not yet figured out that I said yes to everything. The fact was I had never seen a bathroom inside a house. In Africa, you never, ever do your business inside someone’s home, especially not in a home this nice. You go to the toilet away from the house so that you do not defile it.

  “There’s a shower in here as well. And towels in the cabinet there,” Dad said.

  “Can you think of anything you may need?” Mom said.

  “No. Thank you,” I said.

  “All right, Joseph. We’ll let you get some rest. If you need us, we’re right down the hall,” Dad said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  They left the room and I collapsed on the bed. My brain hurt from all I’d seen and heard since I stepped off the airplane. I’d heard that America was a promised land of plenty, but never this much plenty. I knew there had to be people with so much in the United States, but I never dreamed they might let me stay with them, even if it were for just a night or two. Even the bed was like a fairy tale. All my life I’d slept on a plastic mat that did nothing to cushion my body. The UN handed them out to us to protect us from scorpions in the night. This bed was so soft that I found it difficult to get comfortable. I thought about moving to the floor, but I did not want to upset the Rogers. They told me this bed was for me, so that’s where I had to stay. I did not plan on breaking the rules my first night in America.

  I lay on the soft bed, my head spinning. My body screamed for sleep and I wanted to give in. However, the light overhead hurt my eyes. I did not know how to turn it off. Apparently in America people slept with light shining in their eyes.

  I kicked off my shoes, then crawled under the covers. I pulled the blanket up over my eyes. America was more than I ever dreamed it could be, and I had only been here a few hours. I wondered what the coming days might bring.

  TWELVE

  A Child Again

  I woke up early my first morning in America, confused. I did not yet know the term jet lag, but I had a major case of it. I also felt more than a little guilty. My room was so big and so nice, I thought it wrong that I should have so much space all to myself. “I wish my friends in Kakuma could join me here,” I said over and over.

  Once I heard Mom and Dad stirring about the house, I got up. My appetite had returned. Thankfully Mom had food waiting for me. Unlike Kakuma, meals came more than once a day in the Rogers’ home. After breakfast, I wanted to do something I had been unable to do over the past six months in Nairobi. “Dad,” I said, “I would like run, then play football, er, soccer.”

  “Okay, Joseph. You can do that. How far would you like to run?” Dad said.

  “Thirty kilometers.”

  Dad looked over at Mom with a very puzzled expression. “Well, uh, I’m not too good at the metric system, but we can probably arrange that.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Mom said. “I have no idea how far thirty kilometers are. You should give Jim Paccia a call. He will know.” Jim was the coach of the high school cross-country team.

  Dad pulled out his cell phone and left the room. He returned a few moments later with a very shocked look on his face. “You’re sure you want to run thirty kilometers, not thirteen?” he asked me.

  “Thirty, yes,” I said.

  Dad’s jaw dropped. He turned to Mom and said, “That’s eighteen miles.”

  Mom’s eyes got very big. I did not understand what the big deal was. Every boy in the camp who played soccer ran thirty kilometers before he was allowed on the field. My request seemed perfectly normal to me.

  “Well, Joseph, the best I can do is to have you run down the road in front of the house. Follow it down and around until it comes to a big wall called a dam. There and back is fourteen miles. Not quite thirty kilometers, but it’s close.” Then he turned to Mom and said, “Jim is on his way over.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I started to go out the door. Dad stopped me.

  “Hold on. You can’t go running down the street barefoot,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure why he said this. I’d run barefoot every day of my life. He walked over to a closet and pulled out a pair of cheap running shoes. “Here, t
hese should fit you.”

  The shoes fit, but they felt strange to my feet. However, I did not complain or try to take them off. Dad told me to wear these shoes, and so I wore them. Kakuma taught me to follow the rules.

  I shot out the door and took off running down the road. The shoes made my feet feel heavy and out of control. I had no connection between the soles of my feet and the earth below me. These stupid shoes are in the way. Even with the shoes, I felt the heat of the blacktop. As much as I hated running this way, I knew my bare feet would burn on the asphalt.

  Even with shoes, it felt good to run again. The air rushing into my lungs seemed heavier, more humid than what I’d lived with in Kenya. At the same time, I discovered I could run harder without losing my breath. Only later did I learn that I’d spent my entire life in high elevations. Syracuse sits at only 380 feet. I felt like I could run forever here and never grow tired.

  The road to the dam took me past beautiful houses with manicured green lawns. Trees towered over the road. I’d never seen trees so tall. Acacia trees have short trunks and large canopies. These New York trees were both tall and broad! Under the trees, white people worked in flower beds and mowed their yards. Dogs barked as I ran by, which made me pick up my pace. In Africa, dogs are not friendly little pets. People use them for protection. Others run wild in packs. Everyone I know has scars from getting too close to a barking dog.

  Before I knew it, I reached the dam and turned back toward home. The run back took me up a hill, but I did not mind. Running set me free from all my worries and cares. I did not think about how someone had made a mistake in placing me in this home and how they would show up soon to take me away. Instead I lost myself in the feel of my feet against the smooth pavement and the flow of air rushing past my body.

  A little more than a kilometer and a half from Mom and Dad’s house, a man stood waiting for me. I knew he was waiting for me, because when I ran past, he started running with me. “Hi, Joseph, I am Jim Paccia, and I’m a friend of your mom and dad.”

  “Hi,” I said, not breaking stride.

  The man began breathing hard. He seemed to have a little trouble speaking. “Wow, you sure are running fast,” he said between breaths.

  I did not understand what he said. I thought he told me I was running too slow. Running slow is one thing I do not do. My parents named me Lopepe, “fast,” for a reason. The moment I heard I was running too slow, I thought, I will show you, and kicked it into another gear.

  The man disappeared in the distance behind me. I ran into the yard and went straight to the shed for the soccer ball. Mom came outside holding a bottle of Coca-Cola. “Would you like one?” she asked.

  I nodded with a smile. I love soda.

  The man came stumbling up to the house a little while later. I didn’t pay much attention to him. Instead I ran around the yard kicking the ball, practicing the moves I’d learned in very heated games in Kakuma. I’d heard they had real soccer teams in America, and I really wanted to join one. We played some games as a team in Kakuma. Our section of the camp went against teams from other sections. That is, those of us from equatorial South Sudan went up against teams of refugees from other parts of Sudan or Somalia or Rwanda. However, we didn’t look like a team because we didn’t have uniforms. American teams always had uniforms. I’d heard they even had their names on the back. To me, that was the ultimate. If you had your name on the back of a uniform, you had arrived.

  I ran again the next day. And the next and the next. Running was about the only thing familiar for me in America. I had to learn everything else from scratch. In some ways, I was like a toddler because I knew nothing about the most basic elements of life here. My first lesson came on my second day in the Rogers’ home. Dad came into my room carrying a lamp. “I picked this up for you,” he said. “It will be a little more comfortable for you to sleep with this on instead of the overhead light.” He plugged in the lamp and set it on a table. After turning on the lamp, he walked over and flipped the light switch down, turning off the overhead light.

  So that’s how you turn that thing off! Whew. I don’t think I could sleep with that thing shining in my eyes another night! That’s what I wanted to say, but I didn’t know how to say it in English. Instead I simply said, “Thank you.” I never slept again with the light, or the lamp, on.

  The shower took more time to master than the light. Mom and Dad showed me the shower my first day. “You turn the water on like this,” Dad said, lifting up the single handle. Okay, I could remember that. Raise the lever and water comes pouring down from above. It beat bathing with a bucket of water. However, I quickly discovered the shower was not as great as I first thought. The first time I tried to use it, I raised the lever and climbed inside. Brr! That was the coldest water I’d felt in my life. I jumped around, trying to wash and stay warm at the same time, without much success with either. No wonder these people were so white. Showering every day in such cold water had to turn them that way.

  I turned the water off and stood there, shivering, waiting for the water to dry. Mom showed me the towels and told me to use one to dry myself, but the towel felt more like a blanket. I couldn’t use something so nice to wipe water off my body.

  After a few days of frigid showers, I decided to go back to what I knew. I found a large pot in the kitchen and filled it with hot water.

  Dad walked in. “What are you doing, Lopez?” By this time I told him my friends all called me Lopez.

  “Getting water for shower.”

  “We have hot water upstairs too,” he said.

  I gave him a look that told him I thought he was crazy. I caught myself before any words came out of my mouth that might make him angry. “No problem,” I said, “I can use this.”

  “Come on, I’ll show you,” he said. He led me upstairs and showed me how to turn the lever in the shower and change the temperature of the water. Thank God! I knew I could not take one more cold shower.

  “Thank you, Dad,” I said. I returned the pot to the kitchen and went back upstairs for a shower. I moved the lever as far from the frigid water as I could and stepped inside. Whoa! I thought the hot water might boil my skin right off of me. I danced around, trying to bathe while avoiding burning myself, without much success with either.

  Over the next several days I experimented with the lever, moving it back and forth to several places on the dial. Some days I froze and other days I fried. Finally, after ten or twelve days, I happened to find a place where the water was not too hot and not too cold. From that day until the day I moved off to college, I never moved that lever again!

  I learned to use the toilet a little quicker, but it took me a very long time to become comfortable with it. In Africa, you do not do your business inside a house, especially not in a house as nice as Mom and Dad’s. For the first few days I could hardly bring myself to use the toilet. Unfortunately, Mom kept offering me Cokes and I kept drinking them. I wanted to go out in the yard, but Rascal, the family dog, was the only one with permission to do his business outside. That left me no choice but to come to terms with an indoor toilet that sat in a room close enough to all the other people in the house to hear what was going on in there.

  At first the size and shape of the toilet, to say nothing of the flush mechanism, threw me for a loop. All the toilets I had ever seen consisted of a hole in the ground with a board placed over the top to keep you from falling inside. Needless to say, the indoor bathroom was much nicer than a hole in the ground.

  Slowly I learned my way around the house. However, I kept waiting for the day when the Rogers would discover a mistake had been made and I would be forced to leave and go to work. That day never arrived, and I did not understand why.

  Instead of forcing me out, Mom and Dad worked to make me feel welcome. They invited the neighborhood teenage boys to come to our house nearly every day. Communicating with these boys was a bit of a problem, but we found a way around it. On warm, sunny days we played soccer in the backyard along with bask
etball on the driveway. When it rained, which seemed very odd to me that rain could come in the middle of summer, we went inside and played Uno and Mancala. Mancala is actually an African game that my friends and I in Kakuma played using rocks and holes in the ground. I never imagined finding it in America. My new friends also introduced me to a new game with a Swahili name that means “build”: Jenga.

  I spent a lot of time that first summer playing games with my new friends. Along the way they taught me words in English I had never heard before. Mom quickly pointed out that these were words I should not use, ever.

  About a week after I arrived, Mom announced, “Joseph, we need to get you some new clothes.” The agency that arranged my stay with them did not tell her or Dad my story. They assumed I would bring clothes with me. I didn’t. The first few days I wore Robby’s hand-me-downs. Now it was time for clothes of my own.

  Mom took me to a large clothing store. When we walked in, I could not believe my eyes. I had never seen so much merchandise in one place. She held up a pair of pants and asked, “Do you like these?”

  “Yes,” I said. Yes remained my default answer to all questions.

  She led me down a few more aisles. “How about this pair? Do you like them?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about this shirt?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about this one?” she said, holding up the ugliest shirt I had ever seen in my life.

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh.” She put all the clothes down. “Joseph, you do not have to say yes to everything. I need you to tell me what you really think. It will be okay. You won’t get in trouble for telling me no.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “So, what about this pair of pants? Do you like them?” she asked.

  “Yes,” my words said, but my face said no.

  “No you don’t.” She put them down and found another pair I liked much better. “What about these?”

  “Yes!” I said. My words and my face finally said the same thing.