At 9 Years Old, He Fled War in Sudan. NOW HE'S MAKING HISTORY.

Dominic Lobalu is one of the top middle-distance runners on the planet. How he went from refugee limbo to the Olympic Games.

- ALEXIS OKEOWO

Before you turn 9 years old, your life is split in two. In the first part, you are happy. Your parents are farmers, and you live with them and your sisters in Chukudum, a small village in the green Equatoria region of what is now South Sudan, not far from the border with Uganda. You play with your friends in the green.

In the second part, you are separated from your family after your home is attacked. It is 2007, and civilians are caught in violent clashes between government forces from the north and rebels from the south, and also among the various rebel groups. A peace deal two years earlier that was supposed to end the two-decade civil war between northern and southern Sudan is falling apart.

You jump onto a truck with other boys who have been separated from their families. It brings you to a refugee camp in Kenya called Kakuma, a place you've heard about with thousands of refugees that is so big it could be a city. Conditions are bleak: crowded, dilapidated housing; little clean water; malaria and cholera outbreaks; and high temperatures. You cry, desperately, and want to go home.

You get a scholarship to study in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, but after you finish primary school, you can no longer afford the fees. You live in an orphanage, and realize that no one really cares about what happens to you. You start working at a market unloading trucks of cabbage, watermelons, bananas, and tomatoes for a few dollars a day.

When you go back to school to offer the little money you've earned at the market, you are asked if you are joking and told not to return. But you can run fast, and you eventually gain admission to a school on a track scholarship. You reconnect with one of your sisters but have no idea what happened to the rest of them and try not to think about it.