COMING TO AMERICA
Now a U.S. citizen, Kipyego runs with purpose
The smiling Texans confused her. They were strangers.
Where she had grown up, in a Kenyan village, as the youngest of seven children to a single mother raising them in a mud hut, people exchanged smiles only when they knew each other. Now, Sally Kipyego laughs at the memory. Nearly 15 years after she came to the United States as an African immigrant with aspirations of becoming a professional runner, Kipyego, 33, will compete Sunday at the Chevron Houston Marathon in her first half marathon as an American citizen.
She earned her citizenship in January of 2017 and took the year off from competing to have her first child. Although technically she was listed as a United States entrant at the 10K in Boston last year, she calls this weekend’s event her “first official” race as an American.
“The beauty about me running under the American flag is because my entire adult life has been spent in America,” she said Friday at the
George R. Brown Convention Center. “I fell in love in America. I got married in America. I had a baby in America. I am American.”
Kipyego starred on the track team at Texas Tech. She met a fellow runner, Kevin, who became her college sweetheart and then her husband. Along the way, she picked up the local customs of Lubbock and stopped seeing America as a place full of strangers.
She smiles when she greets people for the first time.
“It’s good to be here,” Kipyego said. “I flew in and thought, ‘Oh, this is beautiful. I missed Texas.’ ”
She thought the opposite when she arrived on a visa in 2005 expecting to find a kingdom of skyscrapers, new cars and boundless opportunities.
“Then I look out and there’s basically nothing,” she said. “Just farms. An open field.”
Texas shook but restored her expectations. The college scholarship let her pursue a nursing degree while reducing her 5K time from 18 minutes to 15. She gained the exposure needed to join a Nike-sponsored team. She got to build a decorated career — with silver medals won at the 2011 World Championships and 2012 Olympics — and a comfortable life.
“I have gone to bed without food,” Kipyego said of her upbringing. “I want to run for America and raise that flag proudly because of the opportunities that America has given me.”
She and her siblings, two of whom also are professional runners, collectively raised their family out of extreme poverty. She helped put nieces and nephews through college. Her father died when she was young and her mother still is in Tarakwa, a village in the lush county of ElgeyoMarakwet, but lives in a recently constructed house, where she hosts annual reunions on New Year’s Eve.
In Kenya, Kipyego gets teased for tendencies and mannerisms she could not help but adopt from her American friends. She also cherishes the sight of school children running barefoot. She did not have shoes until the fourth grade.
Embedding in two cultures has formed her compassionate world view.
Aside from one time in nursing school when an older white patient saw Kipyego and demanded a different caretaker, her experience in America predominantly has been hospitable. It forced her to think critically about stereotypes.
“From an understanding point of view, I should not judge because you do not know any better,” she said. “It’s something I learned over time being here.
“Not all Africans are poor, so don’t pity them, they’re just fine. That is a terrible assumption. When I say my childhood was happy, it was fantastic. I didn’t wear shoes until I was in fourth grade, but that is not a problem because everybody did not wear shoes until they were that old.”
Kipyego felt offended a year ago, when President Donald Trump referred to Haiti and parts of Africa as “shithole countries,” but she did not believe he spoke on behalf of America.
“Africa is not a shithole, but a sentiment like that,” she said, “does it offend me, yes, quite a lot. But I would never let that affect the way I feel about Americans.
Kipyego hopes to use Sunday’s race as a test for the full marathon she wants to run in Boston in April. She already has imagined how it would go: running by the barriers and spotting her infant daughter, Emma, hoisted up and holding a tiny American flag.
Relatives are looking after Emma in Kenya while mom competes in Houston. Kipyego wants her daughter to learn the same lessons she did in the United States.
“That’s why I run,” Kipyego said. “I don’t want to tell her things. I want to show her what hard work looks like, what commitment looks like, what discipline looks like. I want to take her to places and let her process it herself.”
That could be difficult. In a photo on Kipyego’s phone, she poses in front of a large home in Kenya with Emma, who is dressed in Nike sneakers and a leopard print jacket, with her hair styled in pigtails.
She already is growing up in a different world.
“All privileged,” Kipyego said, half-jokingly. “She’s wearing shoes.”
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