قصة مشاركة العداء من السودان الجنوبي قور ماريـــال في أولمبياد لندن

Quote: My life basically started when I was 6 years old. I was growing up in a small village of Kimotong in southern Sudan. As a young kid, I was trying to go to the church. So, I put on my Sunday best, basically nice shorts and t-shirt and went to the Church and a troop of Soldiers came into the church and order everyone to lay down. And they basically said, 'we want all the kids'. So they took me, from my parents, and other kids. About 78 kids. We ended up in this one group prison for a few weeks while they were feeding us with a grain which is mixed with sand that if you eat it too much it will kill you right away. And, I actually witnessed a lot of kids who would just like sit down and went to sleep and they would never stand up again. So, as a lot of the kids were dying, the commander came over and said "hey, why are we keeping these kids? At least we need to take the ones that can carry the AK-47s to go to training and take them to the war." So 3 of my friends, basically I don't know how they was protecting me so much, but they came over to me they were like, 'Lopez, we're going to escape'. They picked me up in the middle of the night. We could hear the soldiers out there smoking. And we just ran and ran away from them and we didn't know where we were going. That's when my race started, basically. It took us about three days and three nights and we ended up in Kenya. That's where I spent 10 years of my life, in a refugee camp in Kenya. Because there was not enough rationing, what we kept ourselves away from hunger, was, we had to go run 18 miles every day. I was 15 years old and a lot of boys were talking about Olympics, I didn't even know what the Olympics is. And they said 'Let's walk 5 miles to go and watch the Olympics'. And, so, we knocked on this Kenyan guy's door and we sat down and we just watched the games, it was four hundred meters final. And Michael was running very fast and won the race and he went to the podium, the flag was going and the national anthem was like played and I see this guy's crying. In Africa you don't see somebody as grown up, cry. I was like, 'Why did he cry, he just won the race?' United States Agents came over and tell us the United States government wants 3,500 lost boys, so I got the opportunity to come to the United States. We basically took off from Nairobi and I flew all the way to JFK and I had to go take another flight to Syracuse and my family who adopted me was waiting for me there. In 2007 I passed my citizenship test and I made the Olympic team, I went to Beijing and I wore the great colors that I saw in a little black and white TV. On our way there to Beijing a lot of my teammates were like 'Oh, we want Lopez to be our flag bearer'. Everybody raised there hands and I was like 'Woa, no, no, you guys put your hands down'. They said we want you to be our flag bearer because your story is what America is all about and I was just so honored. Just 8 years ago I was in a refugee camp and I didn't even have a country, and now I had a country that I was given the flag to carry and to represent them in the opening ceremony. Hopefully, one kid out there maybe anywhere in the world saw me and actually saw my story, 'That Lopez kid who was just in a refugee camp, now he's in America and representing his country and everything is possible. The red white and blue means so much to me, it means opportunity, freedom and it means anybody can attain whatever they want to do. This is what the red white and blue means to me, what does it mean to you?