Article on Lopez Lomong from earlier this year:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2007-04-23-lomong-focus_N.htm
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — In 2001, 16-year-old Lopez Lomong lived in a refugee camp in northern Kenya. He had lived in camps like it since his family fled Sudan when he was 6, and he thought he might spend the rest of his life this way.
Today, Lomong, 22, is a sophomore at Northern Arizona University and one of the top young distance runners in the country.
At the Big Sky Indoor Championships in February, he swept the 800 meters, 1,500 meters and 3,000 meters within a few hours in Bozeman, Mont., where the elevation is almost 5,000 feet.
In March, at the NCAA Indoor Championships in Fayetteville, Ark., Lomong earned his first national title after upsetting two-time NCAA 3,000-meter champion Chris Solinsky of Wisconsin with a blazing final 200 meters. Solinsky, a pretty good kicker himself, finished 15 meters back.
Lomong ran the second-fastest time in the 800 meters this year (1:47.65) when he defeated Southern California's Duane Solomon at the Stanford Invitational on March 30. (Solomon posted the year's best time, 1:47.19, at the Mount SAC Relays in Walnut, Calif., on April 15.)
Lomong says his earliest introduction to running happened when he and his family fled Sudan to avoid being killed by the Janjaweed, a rebel militia that attacked their village of Kimotong. It was 1991. Lomong was 6.
For three days Lomong recalls running in the African wilderness to save his life. He split from his parents and two younger brothers and arrived at the Sudan-Kenya border with other boys. In Kenya, he ended up in a refugee camp run by Catholic missionaries.
Despite being separated from his family, Lomong says he is considered one of the lucky children. Thousands of boys drowned, were eaten by wild animals or were shot by military forces.
He lived as a refugee for more than a decade, convinced he would spend his life at the camp.
"We had almost nothing at the camp. Every day we played soccer and ran," Lomong says.
In 2001, the Catholic refugees relief operation, with support of like groups, arrived at his camp to give boys such as Lomong a second shot at life.
The officials asked Lomong and other children to write essays explaining what they would do if they could live in America. Lomong wrote he wanted to be happy and free and make new friends. That convinced officials to set him up with a foster family in Tully, N.Y., a white upper-middle-class town upstate.
"When Lomong arrived, he was so overwhelmed. He wasn't sure he could trust us," Robert Rogers says. "We reassured him our home was his home."
Lomong was among the 3,800 boys to arrive in the USA with the program that would be known as the Lost Boys of Sudan, resettlement for those displaced during Sudan's second civil war. Lomong, who hopes to gain his citizenship this summer, says he tries not to talk about what happened in Sudan. Not many girls survived, being raped, enslaved or killed.
The Rogerses learned at their church how to be foster parents for surviving Sudanese children. The decision to help the young refugees felt like a calling — the right thing to do.
They took in Lomong and two other boys from Kenyan refugee camps. After the boys left for college, the Rogers family took in three more Sudanese boys, who are now in high school.
The good news continues for Lomong, who says he was thrilled when he learned two years ago that his mother and brothers were alive and living in Kenya.
He expects to travel to Kenya this summer to see them for the first time since he was 6. His father, however, is believed to be dead.
