EUGENE, Ore – At six, Lopez Lomong spent three days running for his life through the desert to escape Sudan’s Janjaweed militia. By 16, he’d survived a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp as a Lost Boy. And by last Christmas, he’d been reunited with his parents and gone back to visit a grave – his own.
When the Olympic Track & Field trials resume today, the adopted New Yorker will stand just three 1,500-meter races from overcoming his nightmare by realizing his dream – representing Team USA and his new country in the Beijing Olympics.
“It would mean a lot, coming from Sudan and raised all by myself. My goal is just winning the gold. This here is a dream for a long time,” said Lomong, one of 20,000 Lost Boys who fled during Sudan’s civil war to avoid being turned into a child soldier by the government-supported Janjaweed.
“I was just one of the Lost Boys; now I’m an American. I can compete for the country I want, payback to all the people who helped me. I want to say Thank You.”
Lomong will run tonight’s quarterfinal and hopefully tomorrow’s semi and Sunday’s final, vying with reigning 1,500 world champion Bernard Lagat and U.S. mile record-holder Alan Webb. That is daunting competition; but running a simple race must seem easy after the gantlet he’s already run.
Lomong – a member of the Boya tribe – was just six when the militia stormed the church he was in and kidnapped roughly 50 children from his village of Kimotang, bent on pressing them into life as child soldiers.
He spent three terrifying weeks in a military camp, one of 100 boys thrown into a single room, fed a mix of grass and sand, beaten for simply asking to use the toilet. Some died of starvation, many of torture, others of dysentery. Death was not hard to find.
One night, three teenagers who knew Lomong came and helped him escape. They ran three days through the wild, dodging predators – both the animal kind and the militia – and walking hundreds of miles, hiding Lomong and at times even carrying him until they reached a refugee camp in northern Kenya.
“I was running through the wilderness. Running saved my life. Now I’m running for fun,” Lomong said. “The ultimate goal was to survive. You had to get your own food, work just to survive. As I grew up I was taking care of other kids like we were a family. I brainwashed myself, said this is home.”
He thought he’d die there as well, until his 2001 essay proved so moving he was among 3,800 children picked for U.S. foster families – in his case Robert and Barbara Rogers of Tully (NY), whom he still calls mom and dad.
They welcomed him into their upstate New York home, where they also fostered four other African children. But it was two years later when the telephone in that home rang and the voice on the other end was that of his birth mother, Rita Namana Lomong, who’d thought him dead.
The conversations grew more frequent as he grew into adulthood, even as he began running for sport instead of survival. He became a U.S. citizen last July, the same year he emerged as a legitimate collegiate star for Northern Arizona. He ran a 7:49.74 in the NCAA indoor 3,000 to upset two-time NCAA champ Chris Solinsky, then won the outdoor 1,500 in 3:37.07.
Neither compared to the joy he felt that Christmas, when he flew back to Africa and was reunited with his family – the family that thought him dead, never knowing they’d been in the same 70,000-person refuge camp.
His mother lives in Juju near Nairobi, his dad Awei works the farm in Kimotang. Lomong went to see the stone pile they’d assembled as his grave – “They had to dig me out, bring me back to life,” he said – and the reunited family made up for lost time. They’ll make up even more if he earns them a trip to Beijing in Sunday’s final.
Lomong is studying hotel management in hopes of going back to Africa and building the tourism industry. But what he wants even more in Africa is peace, with the former Lost Boy having joined Team Darfur, a group that opposes China’s financial support of the Khartoum regime through arms sales and oil imports.
“As athletes, we need to send the message to the government not to kill or bomb and to China to stop because those guns are not to defend the country but to kill innocent people. This is the 21st century: We don’t want kids growing up in refugee camps like I did,” said Lomong, who would love to spread that message from the podium in Beijing.
“I’d hold an American flag and a Sudan flag. It would be a way to say “Here was a victim who had to run away, and look where he is now.'”