Running for My Life: One Lost Boy's Journey From the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games (14 page)

A week later we had our second meet. I did exactly what my coach told me to do. When the gun sounded, I took off, but I did not break from the lead pack. Instead I paced myself with the leaders. I enjoyed jogging along with them so much that I tried talking to them throughout the entire race. “Hey, guys, my name is Lopez . . . How long have you been running? . . . Do you play soccer?” I talked and talked and talked even though my English vocabulary was limited. That’s just me; I am a talker. However, the other runners did not answer, at least not after the first kilometer or so. The more I tried talking to them, the more they looked at me like I was nuts.

I ran along, talking away until I saw my mom and dad standing at the one-mile marker. Coach told me that he would place them there so that I would know when to start running hard. Mom yelled something like, “Yay, Joseph, you can do it!” She made me laugh. Mom and Dad came to every cross-country meet. They were the only parents who did.

“Hey, guys,” I said to the other boys at the front of the pack, “there’s my mom and dad. I gotta go. See you at the finish line.” With that, I stopped jogging and took off running. I won the meet, beating around four hundred runners from across upstate New York. I received a gold medal that I wore all the way home. Mom and Dad made a huge deal over it, and I let them. This was a very special moment for me.

Our next-door neighbors were outside when we pulled up to the house. Tom and Fran were around eighty years old. They always made me feel very welcome in the neighborhood. “What do you have there?” Tom called out to me.

“A gold medal,” Dad answered, his voice brimming with pride.

“Come on over here and let me have a look,” Tom said. I was more than happy to show it off. Dad and I walked over to their yard. Tom took a close look at the medal. “Wow, that’s something,” Tom said.

“He beat a field of four hundred,” Dad said.

“Four hundred!” Tom said.

“Yep,” Dad said.

“You know, I bet you can run in the Olympics someday for the USA,” Fran said.

Fran’s words took me right back to watching Michael Johnson on the black-and-white television. “Yes,” I said. “That is my goal. One day I will run in the Olympics.” Until this moment, the Olympics had always been a far-off dream. Fran nailed it down for me. Running for the USA was no longer a dream. It was my goal, and I would give all I had to reach it.

My mother had another goal for me, and she made sure I gave my all to reach it as well. Within days of my arrival, she told me, “You may be behind now with your education, but we will make sure you catch up. You will graduate from high school on time, and you will go on and get a college education.” She did not ask my opinion in the matter. Whether I liked the idea or not, I would finish high school and I would go on to graduate from college. No discussion. No debate. This was just the way it was going to be. It wasn’t that she was trying to force something upon me. She knew the value of an education. More than that, she saw within me the ability to reach this dream. She believed all I needed was the opportunity; then I could do the rest. And she moved heaven and earth to make sure I got the opportunity to learn.

At the time, Mom’s goal seemed impossible. For starters, I spoke almost no English, and I could read even less. To graduate on time I had to start off in the tenth grade. “He’s sixteen,” Mom told the school administrator when she enrolled me. “He belongs in the tenth grade.” Age-wise, she had a point. However, academically, they should have placed me in kindergarten. I struggled to read, “See Jane. See Jane run. Run, Jane, run.” I did not know a consonant from a vowel, and the sounds these strange letters made did not match my Swahili patterns of speech. My math skills were not much better. As for science and history, I did not have a clue.

Mom did not see why such minor details should stand in my way. She made hard and fast academic goals for me, and she would accept nothing less than everything I could give. From day one she worked with me on my English. Every morning she wrote a note for me on the dry-erase board on the refrigerator. I had to figure out what it said. She also placed sticky notes with English names written on everything in the house.

At the same time, she pushed the school administrators and counselors just as hard. Tully High School did not have an ESL program when I arrived in the United States in July 2001. They did by the time I started school that fall, thanks to Mom. She pushed and pushed until the school gave in and started the program. Once classes started, she pushed the school even harder. Whenever a problem arose, she insisted the staff meet with her and settle the issue. After a while the counselors grew afraid of her. I never had anyone work so hard for me.

Once school began, I found it hard to keep up. Mom hired a tutor to help me. Even with the help, there were days my brain ached from it all. At first I did my assignments in Swahili, then translated my work into English. One night I stayed up until two in the morning, pecking away at the computer downstairs, trying to complete a class assignment. Mom never let me get down on myself. “You are very smart, Joseph,” she told me over and over. “You can do this. Once your English improves, nothing will be able to stop you.”

I believed her. And I kept trying. Thankfully, every school day ended with cross-country practice. Once again, running became my release, my therapy. I did not have to know the difference between a noun and a verb to run as fast as I could. Before long, running became more than therapy. The team became my closest friends.

One of the hardest tasks I faced each day was working the combination on my school locker. Spinning the knob right, then left, then right again made absolutely no sense to me. I could not figure it out. By the time I did manage to open my locker, if I opened it at all, I wasted so much time that I walked in late for my next class. I hated being late. Even though time did not matter in Africa, when it came to schoolwork, you never came into class after the teacher. Coming in late showed a complete lack of respect for the teacher’s authority.

Tom Carraci, the captain of the cross-country team, saw me struggling and came up with an idea. “Lopez, as soon as class ends, I will meet you at your locker,” he said. “I’ll open it, and you can grab your books and go.” I was never late for class again. Tom and I became best friends, and we still are to this day. Those first few weeks of school, I felt very alone in a foreign place. Tom stepped up and helped me navigate through school life. He taught me the meaning of friendship in America.

My first semester didn’t go so well. I failed a few of my classes. Adjusting to the classroom and the constant barrage of English presented enough challenges, and the school environment made life even harder. I had never seen such displays of public affection like I saw in the halls of Tully High School every day. In Africa, boys and girls do not hold hands and kiss. And the teachers struck me as odd, but in a good way. I’d never had a teacher who did not beat me when I made a mistake. Although I preferred not getting swats for messing up a math quiz, it took some getting used to. I guess all the changes were too much. I ended up failing a couple of classes.

Mom didn’t care. She marched up to the school and announced that I would be given the opportunity to take my failed classes the following summer. No one argued the point with her. The following summer, I passed every class I had failed before.

Long before passing my classes in the summer, one teacher turned school around for me. My history teacher, Miss Riley, opened my eyes to a larger world I never knew existed and made me love school in the process. She found a way to connect with me and to connect my interests with learning.

During the unit on World War II, everyone had to write an essay on some topic connected to the war. I had no idea what to choose. Up until a few weeks earlier, I had never heard of World War II, or World War I for that matter. Miss Riley noticed I was struggling.

“What are you most interested in, Lopez?” she asked.

The answer was easy. “Running,” I said. “I am going to run in the Olympics.”

Miss Riley nodded like she knew something I did not. She pulled a book off a shelf and handed it to me. “Have you ever heard of Jesse Owens?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I think you will like learning about him. Why don’t you read this and write your essay about him?”

I looked at the book cover. Jesse Owens was black, like me, and he was a runner! “Okay,” I said.

Let me tell you, that book and that class opened up my eyes to see my Olympic goal as far bigger than sports. Jesse Owens competed in the 1936 Olympics, which were held in Nazi Germany. Hitler planned on using the Olympics as a way of showing the superiority of the Aryan race, but Jesse Owens singlehandedly shoved that in his face. Not only was Owens an American, he was black as well, which made Hitler madder still. Jesse Owens refused to back down and, in the process, made a statement to the world.

Jesse Owens inspired me. I made up my mind that I wanted to be like him. Yes, I was going to compete in the Olympics, but I would do more than compete. I would use success as a runner to make a difference in the lives of others. To do that, I needed an education. I made up my mind. I could reach this goal as well. Just like my Olympic dream, all I needed was to work hard and refuse to let failures get me down. If I did that, the rest would take care of itself.

FOURTEEN
9-11

T
he bus dropped me off at school. I still felt a little out of place here. It was only my third week of school. Trying to communicate with my teachers and fellow students left me frustrated. I felt most comfortable around the guys on the cross-country team. Running is a language all its own, and I spoke it pretty well. Mom and Dad and I understood each other a little better, although no one understood me as well as Rascal, the family dog. He and I were on the same wavelength from the start.

I weaved my way down the halls, past the overly affectionate couples near the front door, and through the group of freshman boys huddled together near the gym. Freshmen stood out because they were so much smaller than everyone else.

The first bell rang. I went to my first class. The teacher lectured. I tried to tune my brain into English. I still thought and dreamed and daydreamed in Swahili. Switching to English was like tuning in a radio station that is just out of range. Forty-five minutes later the bell rang. First period ended.

I headed to my locker. The mood in the hallway felt different. Something odd seemed to be going on, but I had no idea what. With the language and cultural differences, normal days felt odd to me. Even so, something felt even more abnormal than usual between first and second period. I overheard a few people talking about a plane crash, but I did not stop to ask questions. Next period was Miss Riley’s history class, and I did not want to be late.

Tom waited at my locker for me. He wore a worried look. “What’s going on?” I asked him.

“I’m not sure. A plane crashed in New York. It hit the World Trade Center. I heard it looks pretty bad,” he said.

“That’s terrible,” I said. I didn’t know much about plane crashes or New York. I thought it might be far away, but I was not sure. My flight from New York to Syracuse didn’t last long, which made me think it had to be close by.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “You good here? I gotta get to class.”

I grabbed my books. “Yep. Me too. See you at practice.”

“See you then,” Tom said and took off. I slammed the locker shut and hurried to Miss Riley’s class. I got there before the bell rang, which was always my goal. I hated being late for class. When your name is Fast, there is never an excuse for arriving late.

The bell rang. Class started. Miss Riley took roll. “Ann?” “Here.” “Carl?” “Here.” “Lopez?” “Here.” The day was exactly like any other school day. “Turn to page thirty-seven of your textbook,” Miss Riley announced. Pages ruffled throughout the room. She started lecturing on some place far away, and I did my best to keep up with her. Even though my language skills had improved since July, I still had trouble following long, fast, complex sentences in that distinctive American accent. I think I caught about two-thirds of her lecture, which was a lot better than the zero percent I would have caught just three months earlier.

Maybe fifteen minutes into Miss Riley’s class, the bell rang. Everyone jumped, startled. The bell wasn’t supposed to ring for another thirty minutes. It rang again, stopped, then rang again and again and again. I looked around the room. Everyone had the same confused look as me, including Miss Riley. “Fire drill?” I asked someone close by.

“Doesn’t sound like a fire drill to me,” he said. “Fire drill is one long blast, not this on and off.”

The bell rang one last time. Half the class stood up; part of us stayed seated. No one knew what to do.

The principal came over the intercom. “All students proceed as quickly as possible to the auditorium. Leave your books and leave now.”

Miss Riley stood. “You heard the announcement. Leave your books and line up at the door.” She led us out into the hall, which was now packed with people. A group of girls walked by, all of them crying. I glanced around. Even guys were crying. I heard someone say something about a second plane. A couple of people near me talked about an attack and war.
Why would anyone in America use such words?
Fear filled the hallway. The looks on the faces reminded me of my days long ago of running into caves with my family when the Sudanese jets flew over our village. I had no idea what was going on, but I seemed to be the only one. Everyone else seemed to understand that something horrible had taken place.