Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey From the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games (2 page)

I marched along blindfolded for what felt like a very long time. In truth we probably walked around fifty meters. Distances always seem longer when you cannot see where you are going. The line stopped and then moved forward much more slowly. The shirt in front of me pulled away from my hand and was gone. I reached out, feeling for it so that I could stay in line. I did not want to be beaten. Suddenly, a hand yanked the blindfold off my eyes while another hand shoved me in the back.

I stumbled forward and blinked hard. I expected the sunlight to hurt my eyes, but it didn’t. Looking around, I found myself inside a thatch-roofed, one-room hut crammed full of children and teenagers. The room was dark considering it was still afternoon. There were no windows and only one door. Some light came through the thatch overhead.

I moved quickly away from the door. The soldiers there kept shoving more and more children into the one-room hut, which was already quite full. The room was smaller than my living room today, yet there had to be nearly eighty of us crammed inside. As I looked around I noticed something else: all the girls were gone. When the soldiers invaded our church, they took all the boys and girls. Now the girls were nowhere to be seen. I did not want to think about what might have happened to them.

All the boys in the hut wore the same dazed expression. No one looked familiar, even though most of those inside the room went to my church. Our church met in between several villages and served families from a wide area. Perhaps if I’d been older, I might have recognized someone, but when you are six, your life revolves primarily around your own family and those who live closest to you. At least it did for me.

Standing alone inside the crowded hut, all I could think about was my family. I wanted my mother and father to burst through the door and save me. I wanted to play with my two brothers, Abraham and John, and my sister, Grace. For some reason, on this particular Sunday, my brothers did not leave for church with me and my mom and dad. Abraham is two years older than me, while John and Grace are both younger. Abraham was going to bring John and Grace to a later service. I don’t know why he decided to do that or why my parents let him. At this moment, I was glad they did. As much as I missed them and longed to see them, I was glad no one else in my family had been kidnapped by these soldiers. They might have left John and Grace because they were so young, but Abraham would be right here with me in this prison camp.

I tried to push those thoughts from my mind and concentrate on what was happening around me. The instinct to survive had already started to kick in. I did not feel hungry or thirsty even though I’d had nothing to eat or drink since I left home for church with my parents. Maybe I was in shock. I do not know. Food and water were the last things on my mind. Apparently they were the last things on the soldiers’ minds as well, because they did not offer us any.

Now that my blindfold was off, I studied the soldiers at the door. When they had invaded my church, they all seemed like giants. Not anymore. Several of them appeared to be around the same age as the oldest kidnapped boys. Their uniforms were tattered and worn-out, hardly uniforms at all. Most of the soldiers were barefoot.

“They’re rebel soldiers,” someone behind me said. I turned, thinking he was talking to me.

“How do you know?” someone else replied.

“Look at them. You can tell by their clothes,” the first boy said. I now saw this first boy was not a boy at all. He was probably one of the older ones in the room. He may have been fourteen or fifteen.

“Then why did they take us? I thought the rebels were fighting for us,” the second boy replied.

“They are,” the first boy said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” the second boy said. “If they are the good guys, why would they kidnap all of us boys?” That’s what I wanted to know too.

“Don’t you see?” said the first boy. “They didn’t kidnap us. We’ve been recruited by force to become soldiers.”

That explanation seemed to make perfect sense to these two boys, but it didn’t to me. I could not lift a gun, much less shoot one. How could I become a soldier? None of this made any sense to me.

“Lopepe,” someone said.

I looked up.

“You’re Lopepe, aren’t you? From Kimotong, right?”

I was almost too afraid to answer. The boy asking the questions appeared to be around thirteen or fourteen. Two others stood next to him.

“When I saw them shove you through the door, I thought that was you,” the boy said. He introduced himself and his two friends to me. They may have told me their names, but I don’t remember. Every other detail of that day is burned into my mind. I can see it like it was yesterday, but I cannot remember the names of these three boys.

“We’re from Kimotong too. We know your family. You have an older brother named Abraham, right?”

“Yes,” I said, still wondering who these boys were and what they wanted from me.

“Is he here too?”

“No. He and my other brother and sister were coming to a later church service. I was the only one taken.”

“Don’t worry,” said the boy. “You stick close to us and you will be all right.”

“Really?” I asked. “Why would you want to look out for me?”

“We’re from the same village, which makes us family.”

I smiled for the first time that day. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”

For the first time since my nightmare began, I felt like I was not alone. God had sent three angels to watch over me. Soon they would do much, much more.

TWO
My Stolen Life

I
hardly slept that first night in the rebel prison camp. So many boys packed the hut that I barely had room to lie down. Nor did I have a mat on which to sleep like I did at home. Instead I and all the other boys lay down on the cold, hard ground wherever we could find an open space. And it was cold by African standards. Summer days in South Sudan are hot, but the nights are very cool. I blew into my hands to try to warm them up. When that didn’t work, I put them in my armpits. At home I had a small blanket to cover up with. Not here.

I could not get warm. No one could. All around me boys shivered in the cold. Instinctively, I scooted over to a boy near me and put my arms around him. He hugged me back. Before long, everyone near me was pressed against everyone else. That wasn’t hard to do since we were packed into that small space like sardines. In America, boys won’t get that close to another boy, no matter how tight the space. No one in that hut had a problem with snuggling against another boy and hugging him through the night. It was the only way to keep warm.

As soon as it got dark, boys began crying for their families. Everyone cried at some point in the night. The conversations started around the same time. No one dared talk loudly. Instead we whispered as softly as we could. The same conversation took place all around the room. “Why do you think they took us? What’s going to happen to us now? Will they ever let us go back home? Do you think we will ever see our families again?” The whispers grew louder and louder the longer we talked. When we got too loud, a guard stuck his head inside the door and screamed, “Shut up in there!” The room fell silent for a few minutes. The only sounds were the youngest boys sobbing in the dark. Before long the whispered conversations started again. The whispers grew louder and louder until the guard screamed at us again. This went on all night.

My stomach hurt from hunger. I did not feel like eating, but my stomach told me it wanted food. I also needed to go to the restroom, but I was too afraid to ask the guards at the door where the restrooms were located. We all were that first night. My nose told me some of the boys went ahead and took care of their business anyway right there inside the hut. I didn’t need to go that badly.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The way I saw it, if I were asleep, I would not think about being hungry or needing to go to the restroom. When I closed my eyes, my mind floated back to my family. I saw our mud hut with its thatched roof. The fireplace on which my mom cooked during the rainy season and which we used to keep warm on cold nights was in the center of the hut. My parents slept on one side of the fire, and my brothers and sister and I slept on the other. A storage room sat off to one side, with another storage area built up high. We kept all our food up there. Sometimes when it rained, the water seeped in from outside and made the floor wet. That’s why we kept the food in a high place—plus, it made it harder for little boys to sneak a snack. I loved my home. I always felt safe there. Even at night I never felt afraid. I used to drift off to sleep listening to our cows rustling around outside.

I awoke to the sound of the cows talking among themselves. They sounded angry.
How can cows talk?
I wondered as I opened my eyes. Only then did I remember how far away I was from my mat and my fireplace and my cows and my family.

The door opened on the far side of the hut. “Eat,” a soldier called out. He shoved a large plastic bucket into the hut and slammed the door. All the boys rushed over to the bucket and dug in. Everyone was pushing and shoving so much that I didn’t know if I would be able to get close enough to it to find out what was inside. My three teenage friends, my three angels, found me. “Follow us, Lopepe,” one said. He pushed his way through the crowd. I held onto him and followed behind.

The bucket contained cooked sorghum. It is a common food in Africa. The plant looks like corn in the field, but the grain looks a lot like millet. Most people cook it into a porridge, or at least they soak the grains to soften them before they cook them. The rebel soldiers did neither. Normally cooked sorghum looks a little like oatmeal. This stuff looked like dirty mush.

When the soldiers slopped the sorghum into the bucket, they didn’t even drain off the excess water. It looked disgusting, but I was too hungry to care. I plunged both hands into the bucket and grabbed all my hands could hold. I sat down not far from the bucket and shoveled the grains into my mouth as fast as I could. Something hard crunched between my teeth. I spit it out, then went right back to shoveling food in. “Slow down, Lopepe,” my friend said. “This stuff is half sand. Eat it like this.” He sifted through the sorghum and ate grains individually. Other boys around the room weren’t as careful. A short time after we finished eating, I noticed several holding their stomachs and groaning. The food had made them sick.

A boy went over and knocked on the door. The guard opened it slightly. “I need to go to the restroom,” the boy said. He was a little older than me, but not much.

“Oh you do, do you?” the guard said.

“Yes sir, very badly,” the boy said.

The guard reached in and yanked the boy out by the arm. I heard the sound of a cane crashing down on the boy. I’d heard the sound before, but never on a boy. Farmers used canes to keep their cattle in line. The boy cried out, but the cane kept slapping down on him until he had received ten whacks. A short time later the sound echoed through the hut a second time. The door flew open, and the boy tumbled back inside. Blood ran down from a split lip, and his eye had nearly swollen shut.