Article September 12, 2005 Issue

RUNNING FOR HOME

By Marilyn McNaught

It all started when my husband, Bob, was looking for a race in Africa to fulfill his goal of running a marathon (26 miles or 42 kilometers) on every continent. The World Humanitarian Marathon & Ultramarathon Foundation was sponsoring its fifth marathon for the Saharawis in the Algerian Sahara. Thirty years ago, nearly 200,000 Saharawis were displaced from Western Sahara and granted asylum in a desert area considered uninhabitable. Today, 80 percent of the now 100,000 refugees are women and children. We joined 200 athletes from around the world who had gathered to participate in this annual marathon to help rekindle hope and raise desperately needed funds for the children.

So there we were, for a week, guests of a Muslim family in a refugee camp in the Sahara. They, who had so little water or food, shared what they had. They even presented us with traditional robes and necklaces. How far away from our home in the Pacific Northwest it seemed!

Over the years, we've stayed with families in Thailand's Golden Triangle, on an island on Peru's Lake Titicaca, and in Japan; stayed in a mining camp with Inuits in the Canadian Arctic Circle; enjoyed a coffee ceremony in an Ethiopian grass hut; and had tea with the king of Mustang in Nepal. Wherever we were, I prayed to feel at home. This prayer has given me a deepening appreciation of what it means to be at home, even in the Sahara desert.

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