Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey From the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games (5 page)

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

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 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.

Kakuma was a tent city filled primarily with boys like me, boys from Sudan who’d 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 doesn’t 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 that’s 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. I’ve 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.”

“You’ll have to do chores around here, just like the rest of us.”

“That’s 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. That’s the region of Sudan where I and the other boys in this section all came from.

It didn’t 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 didn’t 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
squeak, squeak, squeak
of the wheelbarrows rolling through the camp. When we heard it, we all took off running.

I had no idea what was happening the first time I heard the
squeak, squeak, squeak
go by. The boys in my tent rushed out and yelled back at me, “Hurry up, Lopepe! You don’t want to miss out on this!” I raced to catch up with them. We ran across the camp until we came to a pit. Inside the pit was the garbage dump.

The moment a UN worker emptied the first wheelbarrow over the edge into the dump, mayhem broke out. Boys jumped down into the pit and dug through the garbage as quickly as they could. Elbows flew; fights broke out. Boys went after the garbage like hungry hyenas fighting over a gazelle carcass. One of the boys from my tent popped up from the pit, handed me a half-eaten banana, and said, “Get it back to the tent and don’t let anything happen to it.” I did what I was told. That was part of life in my camp family. We all had chores to do, roles to play, and we all did them. I guarded that banana like it was the crown jewels of England.

It didn’t take very many Tuesdays for me to go from running salvaged food back to the tent, to jumping down into the scrum myself. Even though I was small, I could take care of myself. When an elbow flew in my direction, I ducked out of the way and delivered an elbow right back. My family worked together as a team down in that pit. We fought against the other boys for ripe mangoes and half-eaten pieces of bread, bananas, scraps of meat, you name it. If the Americans working in the UN compound ate it (and all the white people working there were Americans in our eyes, no matter what country they came from), they always threw part of it away. When they did, we found it. Yes, Tuesdays were the high point of our week, the one day we ate well—the day we ate garbage.

Eating garbage was not the only adjustment I made growing up in Kakuma. When I arrived, I only spoke Buya, the language of my tribe in Sudan. Everyone in the camp spoke Swahili. Within a matter of months, I spoke Swahili as well as any of them. With time I forgot how to speak Buya completely.