Rose Nathike Lokonyen, 25, flipped through photos from her time on the Refugee Olympic Team while sitting on the floor of a mud hut in this desert refugee camp, 100\u00a0miles from the border with her home country, South Sudan. Outside, a half-dozen grubby children crowded around a cooking fire, some of them \u00adnaked from the waist down.<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\nIt has been a year and a half since the refu\u00adgee team swept to fame in Rio, hailed as a symbol of hope for the more than 65\u2009million people around the world displaced by conflict. As the world prepares for the next Olympiad, which begins this month in South Korea, the picture for some of the 10\u00a0refugee Olympians is less hopeful. For Lokonyen, it verges on despair.<\/p>\n
South Sudan has been at war since long before it came into being, carved off from Sudan in 2011 after a bloody independence struggle. When she was 8, Lokonyen and her family fled after rival tribesmen torched her village and slaughtered her neighbors. They sought refuge in the Kakuma refugee camp, a constellation of thousands of huts made of silt and dung and sheet metal, enveloped by a permanent haze of dust.<\/p>\n
Kakuma is where she stayed and looked after two of her younger siblings when her parents went back to South Sudan to search for her grandparents. It is where she returned after she ran the 800\u2009meters in the Rio Olympics, met Pope Francis and circled the globe to compete against the best athletes in the world.<\/p>\n
[Refugee Olympians: Ten athletes representing 60 million people<\/a>]<\/i><\/p>\n \u201cMy life has not changed that much,\u201d Lokonyen said, tapping the battered photo album on her lap. She spends most of the year at a modest training facility outside Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, but Kakuma remains her home. Since the Olympics in Rio, she said, she has trained \u201cwithout even benefiting, without even gaining anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Lokonyen has continued to compete internationally. She ran the 800 meters in last year\u2019s World Championships in London. She and the other refugee athletes are not paid, and they return from foreign competitions to face many of the same hardships they faced before they were Olympians: poverty, travel restrictions and a bar on gainful employment.<\/p>\n On the track, Lokonyen barely seems to touch the ground. Here in Kakuma, which is home to roughly 185,000 refugees, she spends her days doubled over, cooking on a fire pit and washing dishes with water from a yellow jerrycan. The Rio 2016 ID that hangs from the wall of her hut means less than the ration card, issued by the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, that lists all 15 members of her family who are still eligible for food aid.<\/p>\n Unlike for Yusra Mardini, the refugee swimmer from Syria\u00a0who has appeared in ads for Under Armour<\/a>, hopes of a sponsorship deal have not materialized for the five South Sudanese athletes still living in Kenya.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have been here for almost two years now, but what is the benefit for these young people?\u201d said Yiech Pur Biel, who competed in the 800-meter run in Rio. \u201cAre they going to support my career?\u201d<\/p>\n The UNHCR released this video on Jun. 3, 2016, introducing Rose Nathike Lokonyen as a member of the refugee Olympic team competing at the 2016 Rio Olympics.<\/span>(UNHCR)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The\u00a0International Olympic Committee<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0UNHCR<\/a>, which jointly sponsored the Refugee Olympic Team, have publicly committed to supporting the refugee athletes even after they stop competing. Both organizations have pledged to find accommodations for them and to cover their tuition and school fees.<\/p>\n \u201cThere has always been a commitment to supporting especially the five [South Sudanese] athletes who went to Rio,\u201d said Raouf Mazou, the UNHCR representative in Kenya.<\/p>\n Lokonyen said she was told last year there was no budget for her to begin a program in sports management at a Kenyan college. Her teammate James Nyang Chiengjiek, who ran the 400-meter race in Rio, said he was told the same thing.<\/p>\n Biel is studying international relations, but on a scholarship funded primarily by the German government. His teammate Paulo Amotun is still in high school, while Anjelina Lohalith started a two-year program last fall with funding from UNHCR.<\/p>\n Mazou said there might have been a misunderstanding between the athletes and those funding them that has resulted in the delay. Moving forward, he said, UNHCR and the IOC would support any of the five Rio Olympians in Kenya who wish to study.<\/p>\n Since late 2015, the refugee athletes have trained at the facility in the rolling hills outside Nairobi. Lokonyen returned there in January to prepare for the Commonwealth Games in Australia. For nearly a month over the Christmas and New Year\u2019s holidays, while the training camp was closed, she was home in Kakuma. Every day she spent there cost her seconds on the track.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/img.washingtonpost.com\/rf\/image_1484w\/2010-2019\/WashingtonPost\/2018\/01\/23\/Foreign\/Images\/AP_16219092262136.jpg?uuid=ffyQCgCSEeiGuYkIdDx53Q\")
\nRose Nathike Lokonyen carries the flag of the Refugee Olympic Team during the opening ceremony for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. (David J. Phillip\/Associated Press)<\/span><\/div>\n![](\"https:\/\/img.washingtonpost.com\/rf\/image_1484w\/2010-2019\/WashingtonPost\/2018\/02\/02\/Foreign\/Images\/GettyImages-805617536.jpg?uuid=eYbOHgCSEeiGuYkIdDx53Q\")
\nIn May 2017 during a morning workout near Nairobi, South Sudan\u2019s Gai Nyan (second from right) and Somalia\u2019s Ahmed Bashir (left) run alongside James Nyang Chiengjiek (second left) and Rose Nathike Lokonyen (right), South Sudanese refugees who took part in the Rio Olympic Games. (Tony Karumba\/Agence France-Presse\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/div>\n