Camped out on the clay planes of southern Sudan, 9-year-old Macharia Yuot would dream about a better life that awaited him at a refugee camp across the Ethiopian border. For three years, this fantasy filled him with hope in the face of unspeakable horrors.
From 1991-94, Yuot was one of the 26,000 "lost boys of Sudan," (a name given to them by international aid workers).
The Lost Boys trudged their bare feet through jungle, swamp and desert in search of refuge from the civil war that had engulfed their villages. On the course of the journey, Yuot witnessed scores of young boys die of starvation, gunfire and animal attacks.
For nearly 1,000 miles, Yuot walked.
Today, Yuot's legs continue to perform punishing feats, not for survival but for sport as an All-American cross country runner at Pennsylvania's Widener University.
At the age of 25, Yuot has just closed out his decorated college career by winning November's NCAA division-III cross country championships.
Twenty-four hours later, he placed sixth out of a field of more than 12,000 in the Philadelphia Marathon.
In collegiate races, Yuot was almost always the pacesetter. But as a Lost Boy, Yuot knew never to stray from the middle of the pack. Those who wandered off, Yuot recalled, were shot down by enemy tribesman.
The journey began in 1991 when Arab Muslim tribes of the north pillaged his Christian Dinkan village of Paleek. His parents were forced to part ways with him or risk seeing him enslaved or used as a path-clearer in minefields.
Yuot and a troop of boys - most of them between the ages of six and 10 - were caravanned in a single file line through the vast wasteland of southern Sudan. They walked right through the bowels of a civil war which would take the lives of two million Sudanese from 1983 to 2005.
Yuot parted ways with his parents, brother and two sisters, and says he has not seen them since.
His father Dinkan - seven foot, six inches tall- died in subsequent months of what Yuot was told were "natural causes."
Many died on the journey: Yuot remembers boys getting shot down by hunters, bit by snakes, even devoured by lions.
The remaining few thought the journey was over when they arrived at the Ethiopian border. But soon after, the armed militia ransacked the refugee camp and chased the boys into the Gilo River where an estimated 1,000 Lost Boys drowned, were shot or attacked by crocodiles. Yuot made it across and walked 400 miles with the other survivors to a refugee camp in Kenya.
There he received schooling and began learning English (he is also fluent in Dinka, Swahili and Arabic). In 2000, Yuot was one of the 3,600 Lost Boys chosen to receive permanent living status in the U.S. He flew to Philadelphia where he lived with Sudanese foster parents and attended Catholic high school from 2001-02.
In his senior year, he competed on the track team, but said he didn't take it seriously enough to bring out his full talent. But at Widener, Yuot adhered to a strict training regiment and his improvement was meteoric: Yuot won back-to-back Division-III indoor championships and the 2006 Division-III Cross Country Championships, earning All-America status 14 times.
With his college career over, Yuot said that he now focuses full time on qualifying for the marathon in the 2008 Olympics. He will soon become a naturalized citizen, which would allow him to represent the United States in international
competition.
With a social work major, Yuot spends many of his nights helping out at camps for inner-city children and at a senior citizen's home.
He said that once his running career is over, he plans to return to Africa to do humanitarian work.
Yuot also said he plans to return to Africa in the coming years to reunite with his family, who still lives in the war-torn region.
It is our most basic luxuries like family and security that too many of us take for granted. So next time we think our day has been ruined because our rare steak came back well-done, remember how far Yuot traveled just for bed and schooling.
"There's no country like the United States," he said in a phone interview. "Here, I have choices. I didn't have any choices in Sudan."
