Lopez Lomong - Running for My Life: One Lost Boys Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games

FIVE
Kakuma

L ife in my village of Kimotong 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 dont 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-mans-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.

Kakuma was a tent city filled primarily with boys like me, boys from Sudan whod been separated from their families by civil war. Some had been turned into soldiers. Others came here because their villages had been destroyed in the fighting. None of us belonged here. Yet here we were, far from home, in a country to which we did not belong. I am grateful that Kenya gave boys like me a place to escape war. The border guards who arrested me and my three angels could well have forced us to walk back to where we came from. Even worse, they could have handed us over to the rebels. Instead, they let us stay in their country.

However, it doesnt take long for refugees to figure out that they are not the only ones who wish they could go home. I sensed resentment from people who lived near the camp, especially after a famine hit Kenya. Kenyan law prohibited us from moving out of the camp and permanently settling in the country. It also made it illegal for us to take a job outside the camp. Kakuma was created as a temporary place where displaced people would be safe until the war in Sudan ended. Today, twenty years later, fifty thousand people not only from Sudan but also from Somalia, Ethiopia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda call Kakuma home.

It took three weeks for my feet to heal after the truck brought my friends and me to the refugee camp. About the time I could walk, my friends, my three angels, disappeared. To this day I do not know what happened to them. I got up one morning and they were gone. I thought they must have tried to walk back to our village, since thats where we thought we were going when we escaped the prison camp. Since I had such a difficult time with the first trip, I understand why they did not take me with them. Knowing these boys as well as I did, I think they planned to tell my family where I was so that my mother and father could come and get me.

But that never happened.

The three teenage boys who saved my life were never heard from again. Ive tried to find them on the trips I have taken back to Sudan over the past few years. No one in my village or the surrounding area has any idea who they were. It is as if they simply appeared in the prison camp, took care of me, led me to freedom, and then disappeared, just like angels in the Bible.

With my friends gone, I had to find other boys to live with. I packed up my stuff and went to another tent of boys. Can I live with you guys? I am all by myself, I said.

How long have you been here? they asked.

Three weeks.

Do you have a ration card?

Yes.

Youll have to do chores around here, just like the rest of us.

Thats fine with me. I am not afraid to work.

With that, I had a new home. I lived in a tent of ten boys in camp section fifty-eight. Kakuma was portioned into sections for different tribes and nationalities. I lived in the equatorian section of the camp. Thats the region of Sudan where I and the other boys in this section all came from.

It didnt take long for the boys in my tent to become my new family. All of us looked out for one another and shared what little we had with one another. Once a month the UN called our names for the food distribution. I lined up with all the rest of the boys, held out a ration card, and received a bag filled with grain, some oil, and a little sugar and salt. When I got back to my tent, I combined my rations with those of the rest of the boys. It was the only way we could keep what we had from being stolen.

Right after the food distribution was the most dangerous time for a young boy in the camp. Older boys, boys who were now men of eighteen or twenty years old, from other tribes in other parts of the camp would go from tent to tent, stealing food from the younger, weaker boys. My family of boys in the refugee camp did not have to worry about that. We dug a hole in the middle of our tent, hid our food down inside, then covered our stash with a mud lid someone had made. After that, we covered the whole thing with dirt. A thief busted into our tent and yelled, Give me your food! We all looked up at him with pathetic faces. Someone already stole it all, we cried. The bully turned the tent upside down, looking for our stash, but he never found it. Not one of us ever breathed a word about where our food was hidden. We were too smart for that.

I am not proud to say that I envied these big boys, the ones strong enough to take whatever they wanted. They didnt eat the food they stole from others. They sold it to people outside the camp. That gave these boys something few of us had: real money. The more I watched the strong take whatever they wanted without suffering consequences from their actions, the more I looked forward to the day I would be big enough to do the same. This became my goal in life. In the refugee camp, there was no higher aspiration.

Even with pooling our rations, we only had enough grain for one meal a day. Six days a week we ate our meal in the middle of the night. That way, we were the hungriest when we needed our strength the least.

Yes, six days a week we ate only one meal, but one day was different. Every Tuesday around noon, workers left the fenced UN compound and pushed wheelbarrows to the far side of the camp. Every boy in the place listened for the