'Lost' no longer, NSU senior runs to celebrate finding his way

IT'S FINE TO CALL Norfolk State running star Dominic Luka a Sudanese "lost boy." He will answer to it. He can speak of his desperate escape from civil war-ravaged Sudan at age 12, not long after his father was killed by a sniper's bullet at his front gate.

He can tell his story of fear, fate and the comforting kindness of strangers: of being smuggled across the Kenyan border by a priest to avoid kidnapping or slaughter; spending months in a refugee camp; living with a nun in Nairobi who offered education; finally flying off to upstate New York to foster parents who answered their church's appeal to help the "lost boys."

It is the life and trying times of a vagabond, of searching for one who hasn't seen his mother in 10 years. Luka would like to try, but venturing back to southern Sudan, he says, is still fraught with danger.

To be lost, however, is to be adrift, astray, wayward without an identity - and that is not Luka. Not anymore. He is, in fact, as centered and directed as can be imagined for a 23-year-old who has been lifted from a living nightmare.

"Yes, I am considered a lost boy," Luka says, "but I don't think it's the correct term because I am somewhere. It does not mean that you are lost forever."

This is Luka's place, a year after being voted by Norfolk State's athletic staff as the school's top male athlete. He is the reigning cross-country and 1,500-meter champion in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, as well as its third-best javelin thrower.

Luka will graduate next December with a degree in management information systems. This from one who, with English as his third language, arrived at NSU academically ineligible to compete as a freshman or to accept an athletic scholarship. He has since been placed on a full grant-in-aid, one of only a few Spartan track athletes in that class.

He is the "son" - not legally, but in all other ways - of Rob and Barbara Rogers of Marietta, N.Y., who have taken in six "lost boys." And now, too, Luka is a United States citizen, naturalized in a large ceremony last month in Syracuse.

"That means a lot of things to me," Luka says. "From where I come from to where I've ended up - to be a U.S. citizen. I am able to vote. I can have my voice be heard. I can make a difference."

Seated beside him, coach Kenneth Giles has to smile. Luka, who left high school as one of the best young runners in New York, mattered to Norfolk State track and field the day he stepped onto campus.

"He changed the face of this program because everybody in the country knows Dominic Luka," says Giles, whose teams regularly win MEAC cross country and track championships. "When you get a kid of his caliber - a nationally ranked individual like that - other kids like him want to come."

Luka, in his first season, ran the fastest 800-meter time for a college freshman (1:48:12), Giles says, and qualified for the NCAA championships. He missed advancing to the semifinal round by one-tenth of a second.

Bothered by a leg injury last spring, Luka nonetheless won the outdoor mile, finished third in the javelin and fifth in the 800, but his season ended at the NCAA regional.

Luka is proficient in anything from 200 meters and up, Giles says. As for his javelin expertise, it's a welcome bonus, a product of Luka learning to use a hunting spear as a child.

Luka has been a wonderful surprise in many ways. He played soccer when he came to America in 2001, but turned to organized running when it was apparent from his speed and stride on the soccer field that he was a natural runner.

He excelled and, by his senior year of high school when it was obvious Luka could run at the top collegiate levels, the Rogers stepped in. Having parented Luka in a white community, the Rogers researched traditionally black colleges with strong track programs so Luka could experience "living in America in a black environment," Barbara Rogers says.

Luka, Rogers adds, needed an academic situation challenging enough for him to progress, but not so stiff that he would fall behind early because he was ill-equipped to catch up.

Their homework led them to Giles, who verified Luka's running times, pinched himself a couple of times and welcomed Luka as a pupil.

"God has given me a talent," Luka says, "and you've got to make use of your talent. You must take advantage of it."

To live to that mission, despite the troubled and turbulent times a lost boy has seen, is to live impressively, Rogers says.

"I think they all have a sense of their past that they still are dealing with," she says. "I'm not sure that ever will go away."

The gift for Luka is that he runs not to escape, but to affirm the life he has found.

"I feel blessed, getting out of that kind of situation," says Luka, who this spring hopes to qualify for his new country's Olympic Trials.

"And I give thanks to God for keeping me alive."

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com