John Jay-Cross River cross-country and track coach Dey Dey escaped what is now South Sudan at age 7 after his village was bombed.
• It took four months to get to an Ethiopian refugee camp. Multiple people who were in his group died – some drowning, some taken by crocodiles and some dying of starvation.
• After spending years in refugee camps, Dey, who spoke no English, was moved to Colorado, where, having never competed in running, he became a high school star and then Div. I scholarship athlete.
• Having competed at a world championship, he plans to continue training for elite competition, while also coaching and inspiring his John Jay-Cross River athletes to become better runners.
CROSS RIVER — After he’s asked to look back, it isn’t the first thing he talks about, nor the second, nor the third.
He has to be nudged to discuss it at all and then his recollection is delivered in a matter-of-fact, accepting way.
It was, after all, a long time ago and a history, with tweaks here and there, that’s shared by many.
The story of Dey Dey, the cross-country and track and field coach at John Jay High School in Cross River, is one of escape and of uncertainty, transformed into one of a success neither he nor his family could ever have envisioned for him when he was a child.
Dey was one of an estimated 400,000-plus people to flee Sudan for refugee camps during the 1980s and ’90s.
His escape to Ethiopia from the southern portion of Sudan (now independent South Sudan) came in 1996. It wasn’t planned. It started seconds after government forces, at war with southern-based rebels, bombed his village.
He was 7 years old and fled with only the clothes he wore. More than 150 people were in his group. That included his uncle and aunt and their two children, who were with him, tending to cattle, when the bomb hit early in the morning.
They left behind their grass huts and what had been quiet village life. Left behind friends and other relatives, not knowing who had survived the bomb — whether Dey’s mother, father, three brothers and two sisters had escaped it.
They left before soldiers came in to inflict more violence and death.
Their walk to Ethiopia took four months.
“There were so many little kids, we couldn’t walk far (each day). The older people had to carry us most of the way,” Dey recalled.
Not everyone made it.
“We have real crocodiles. I was lucky because my uncle has to grab me and protect me. … I saw a lot of blood in the water because crocodiles take some … You know, they wait until it’s time for you to get up. They catch you when you’re in the shallow part of the river. That’s when they can get you.”
This is an indelible-ink memory. His uncle wears a hero’s cape in Dey’s eyes. He carried him most of the way to Ethiopia. Dey estimates he personally walked only 30-40 minutes a day. To cross the crocodile-infested Baro River, his uncle swam and walked him across, before going back to the other side twice to do the same with his own children.
Leaving the village was trading an obvious danger for a danger that carried hope.
They left a country that has rarely experienced anything close to prolonged peace — a region racked at the time by civil war and drought-caused famine. A region where childhood was a concept much different from Western culture, where, children as young as 5 were tasked with helping care for cattle, in part by living outside during the December-April dry season to protect, with the help of dogs, calves from lions and other predators. There were no schools and boys from the age of 10 were often seized and transformed into disposable soldiers, by both government forces and by the rebels fighting them. Dey would learn years later, that the government took one of his brothers, at age 13, into its army, but he accepted that because “it becomes normal.”
During the group’s journey, they successfully avoided soldiers. But there were threats equally as great that they couldn’t elude. Besides death by crocodile, some members of the group who couldn’t swim well simply drowned.
There were also slower deaths.
Two men had left with guns and, when they could find them, they shot gazelle for food. But there were many more days without food than with it.
“Some children didn’t make it because there was no food to eat at the time,” Dey recalled of losing people to starvation.
Life in the refugee camp in Ethiopia
Dey’s runners at John Jay-Cross River are aware of at least some of these things, picking up snippets of his story here and there. Some know how he spent most of his childhood in refugee camps — the second of two for more than nine years.
He lived in a tent at the second with a group of other boys who were also without their parents. There was food, daily church services, including for 12 hours on Sundays, but few amenities. An area in the camp where United Nations workers lived had electricity. The rest of the camp was lit at night by lamps and candles. But there was always the warming glow of safety.
It wasn’t for five years that Dey learned his family had survived and that it learned his uncle’s family had also. By then, his friends had become family.
Separating from them was hard. But at 17, Dey said yes when asked whether he wanted to move to the U.S.
He’d been told his uncle, aunt and cousins could go with him but that assurance was subsequently retracted.
And so, assigned to Colorado, he went alone. He recalls a one-night layover at a Days Inn in Newark, New Jersey, where, in his room, he saw TV for the first time. It was turned on and he marveled seeing Shrek. The talking donkey mesmerized him, even if “Donkey” was speaking a language Dey didn’t know, having been taught only some individual words of English while in the second refugee camp.
The memory of Eddie Murphy’s “Donkey” still brings a smile to Dey’s face and it’s a memory unlikely to be forgotten since he didn’t know how to turn the TV off and Shrek played over and over.
Some John Jay-Cross River runners know about Shrek. Some also know how, after being placed by the United Nations in an apartment by himself, with his only real contact someone assigned to periodically check in with him and deliver food, he was told he wouldn’t be allowed to join local kids in school, although he would be allowed to take ESL courses.
It was only a chance meeting in a local park that changed that and changed his life.
Dey ran into two brothers who were from his village who’d left the refugee camp months before he had. They’d been placed in Syracuse but had later moved in locally with their uncle, who’d been in Colorado for years and drove a municipal bus. Dey talked to the man, who invited him to move in with the three of them and rented a bigger apartment to make that possible.
One day the group walked into the gym of a neighborhood school and the lanky, 6-foot-5 Dey was spotted by the school’s top runner, who also was one of Colorado’s top high school runners. The boy immediately decided Dey looked like a runner. He talked to his track coach and soon the 17-year-old Dey was taking a math entrance-placement exam. Despite not speaking English, his 90 on the test got him put into 11th grade.
What followed would seem even more unlikely, Dey, who’d never run except for while playing soccer with refugee camp friends, became one of the state’s best runners. After graduating from high school, where he studied English around six hours a day, he ran for a year at a junior college. He accepted an athletic scholarship from the University of Arkansas over others from other Div. I suitors, including Arizona State and Florida.
While his running career has included injuries and disappointment, he has competed at the World Championships and hopes to compete at that level again.
Locally, Dey is better known for his coaching gifts. He has not only sent multiple runners to the state championships but last fall coached his girls team to a state cross-country title and its top runner to an individual state title. .
Two of the best — Andy Condon, who graduated last spring and now runs cross-country collegiately for Div. I Richmond, and Sloan Wasserman, who’ll run next year for Div. I Boston College — talk about his influence as being life-changing.
“He was able to push me and helped me reach levels I never thought possible. He’s done amazing things for our program,” Condon said last spring.
Condon called Dey’s story “inspiring,” a sentiment shared by many, including Wasserman and teammate Mia Haimelin.
Wasserman not only won the New York state girls Class B cross-country title last fall but also ran a girls course record that day, while posting the fastest time among all 481 girls who ran in four school-size classes. She, Haimelin and their teammates also captured the state Class B girls team cross-country title.
This winter, Wasserman recorded the second fastest time ever by a Section 1 girl in the indoor 3,000 meters, while winning the state public and Federation titles in that event.
“He has faced adversity that no one in this town could even really imagine. It’s just so inspiring. … He was still able to pursue his dreams and work hard. I think that definitely rubs off on us and our team,” Wasserman said.
She credits her rise to being a Div. I recruit to him.
“I would not be anywhere without coach Dey,” Wasserman said.
Haimelin suffered a stress fracture last spring but by fall was ready to run cross-country, in no small part because of the example her coach has set.
She built on her fall performance by capturing silver at the indoor state championships on Section 1’s girls distance medley relay team.
“He’s improved my mindset,” she said. … “I couldn’t believe the grit and determination he had for that,” she said, referring to Dey’s background. “I cannot be complaining when he went through all that.”
All that goes into making a champion
All that includes making the decision to leave comfort behind for new beginnings. He could have stayed at the refugee camp with friends. He could have returned to his village. His uncle, aunt and cousins eventually did.
But Dey had a thirst for more.
Living in a village with no motorized vehicles, no electricity, Internet or phone, he knew nothing about competitive running. But his first day of high school practice, wearing non-running sneakers, he ran right behind his coach (who was on a bicycle) for eight miles and beat everyone else.
“My main goal was to be the best,” he said.
Dey, who competed in the 800 and mile, ran for more than two years for Arkansas. But his senior year, after a stress fracture sidelined him, he said Arkansas took away his scholarship and he returned to Colorado.
But by then, he had a reputation for being a strong runner and he was subsequently invited to participate in the American Distance Project at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado. Starting in 2012, he spent four years there, training under program founder Scott Simmons.
“I loved it,” he said of the experience. “It’s a dream for anyone to one day be in the Olympics.”
Dey also trained three times in Kenya, including after a stint that started in 2017 as coach at Horace Greeley High School. That was made possible through the efforts of Westchester Track Club founder and coach Mike Barnow, who has long supported African athletes and who Dey contacted during one of his training trips in Kenya.
Barnow, who has served as both coach and mentor to Dey, also helped get him the John Jay-Cross River job in August of 2023.
Barnow, who noted he reminds Dey to be patient and to remember the kids he’s coaching don’t possess his athletic gifts, thinks, if he stays healthy, Dey can still compete at a high level, which is Dey’s goal.
Dey probably would have an even more impressive running resume if not for injury and bad luck.
Dey, who due to a stress fracture, missed a significant amount of training and competition time in 2013. Still, he squeezed multiple races into a short, month-long window to qualify that year for the U.S. Championships. His goal was to qualify for the outdoor World Championships.
But in his final race before the U.S. championships, he got badly spiked, then had to hop into a car to drive multiple states to try to earn a spot at worlds.
He made the 800 final on a badly swollen and bleeding leg. But, with his leg bleeding even more, he finished fifth in the final. Only the top three finishers earned a spot at worlds.
In 2018, while working with Barnow, he went to indoor worlds, representing South Sudan in the 1,500. But that experience dissolved with South Sudan failing to get him either transportation or housing and a rare snowstorm in Ireland causing havoc with Barnow’s travel arrangements for him. Dey did compete but only after grabbing a little sleep after being up for 39 straight hours. Predictably, he ran poorly.
His last time representing South Sudan came the following year at the 2019 African Games in Morocco. But, arriving, he learned his country had failed to secure a place for him in the athletes village and that the failure had to do with tribal prejudice.
While the path to elite competition (world championships or even the Olympics) would be a much easier one representing South Sudan, Dey, who secured U.S. citizenship while running for Arkansas, has been working to get cleared again to be recognized as an American athlete.
Barnow, one of the many people to whom Dey points as having been a good friend, instrumental in his success, noted that effort has been long and frustrating but continues.
‘You can push through everything’
In the short-term, Dey, who’s now healthy, plans to compete in multiple 10K races this year.
No matter how his quest to get back to elite international competition pans out, his long-term plan is centered on coaching.
Dey rents housing not far from the high school. He works as a district teacher’s aide and also does outside coaching.
His dad died of an illness in 2015, but, before then, Dey’s parents had another daughter and another son. His brothers and two of his sisters still live in his old village. Dey’s brother who became a soldier survived but, Dey believes, was injured. With things again bad in his homeland (“Right now, it’s worse than before,” he said. “People are dying of hunger” and war is again raging.), Dey sends money home in a circuitous way through two other countries. If he eventually can save enough money, he’d love to bring his mother to the U.S. but, despite the dangers, he believes she won’t come, since she embraces her area’s old ways and rural life.
“I do worry about her,” he said, noting he hasn’t spoken to his mom since July. Their talks were infrequent because the closest place for her to get on the Internet to use What’s App or a messenger service for calls was a two-hour walk. But several months ago, that site was bombed, so there’s currently no direct line of communication with his family.
Reflecting on what might have happened had his uncle not gotten him to Ethiopia, Dey said, “To be honest, I don’t know If I’d be alive now. If I were still alive, I’d be in the army.”
A return for him to a country about which he remembers little is a big maybe.
Dey, who first started thinking about coaching when competing at Arkansas, mentions possibly becoming a college or pro coach at some point.
But if peace ever comes to his homeland, he said he’d like to return to start a running program and also to work to get kids into school.
For the foreseeable future, though, he’s happy to continue to try to make John Jay-Cross River runners better.
“I just want to try my best to help kids. I see a lot of potential (here in them),” Dey said.
“(My) journey,” he added, “can be another way to tell kids, ‘You can push through everything.’ “…Read more by Nancy Haggerty