This story on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning nearly made me start crying in the car.
Lopez Lomong, a former Sudanese “lost boy”, was kidnapped at age 6 by a militant group “recruiting” child-soldiers. He escaped with three older boys and spent 10 years in a refugee camp in Kenya before making it to the US and into a foster home. While in Kenya, he watched the Sydney Olympics and decided he wanted to run fast. In the US, he ran in high school in NY and then in Arizone, and is now a sophomore at the University of Arizona. He became a US Citizen last summer, and made the US Olympic team this summer. He is a member of “Team Darfur”, an activist athelete’s group, and has his own website. He was reunited with his birth-family in 2007, who had believed him dead, and with them joyfully dug up the grave they’d closed 17 years before. (This is the part where I nearly cried. I can’t imagine how his mother must have felt.)
Lomong was selected by his teammates to carry the American flag in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. NPR reports that “On Friday, he struggled to describe what the moment means: ‘I don’t even have a word for it. I’m just so happy — very happy.’”
Lopez Lomong carries the American flag in the opening ceremonies of the Bejing Olympics
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