CLEVELAND, Ohio – Like many in the South Sudan capital of Juba, Brock Kreitzburg awoke Dec. 15 to the opening salvos of what isn't being called war, but it isn't peace, either.

“I walked outside, and in the distance I could hear what sounded like mortars – explosions – and what sounded like gunfire,'' said Kreitzburg, an Akron native. “I wondered, 'Is it just random fighting?' This sounded a lot more serious, with a lot bigger guns.''

It was serious, and it was just the beginning of a conflict that has claimed between 1,000 and 10,000 lives since December, according to various reports, and displaced more than 400,000 of South Sudan's 10.8 million people.

Kreitzburg was the top-ranking official on scene for Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief agency, and he was responsible for a staff of 70 internationals and 800 South Sudanese workers who were reaching out to tens of thousands of refugees – many of whom were about to find themselves in harm's way.

Kreitzburg, 37, was with his new bride, Danielle, who also works for Samaritan's Purse, and he was a few weeks into his job as Deputy Country Director amid a growing crisis.

South Sudan, a landlocked country in central Africa, had experienced almost constant fighting and tragedy for two decades before it separated from Sudan and became the world's newest country in 2011. Since December, the United Nations has reported finding three mass graves. On Tuesday, more than 200 fleeing the fighting, many of them women and children, drowned when their overloaded ferry boat sank in the Upper Nile region.

Kenyan TV report on the exodus from the Sudan

“When the fighting began, it probably was just a couple miles away from where I was. For that week, it continued all around Juba,'' Kreitzburg said this week via Skype.

He could not have been, at that moment, further removed from his previous life as one of the world's top bobsledders. With the Sochi Winter Olympics fast approaching, he is less worried today about his former teammates who will attempt to win a second gold medal without him. He left that life four years ago, or rather, it left him when a chronic hip injury resulted in three surgeries and an eventual hip replacement.

How he wound up in the middle of an African conflict with decades of bloody history was a path that, not unlike a bobsled track, began in rapid decent followed by twists that careened from Hollywood TV sets to tsunami-ravaged Japan.

“It was a very, very hard journey," he said.

“Buried alive”

At the peak of Kreitzburg’s 10-year career as a bobsled brakeman (the guy who rides in the back), he pushed for the U.S. on its top four-man bobsled at the the 2006 Winter Olympics, which did not win a medal, and was driver Steve Holcomb's brakeman when they won the 2006-07 World Cup overall championship in the two-man event.

Kreitzburg's 2006 4-man bobsled Olympic runs

Holcomb would go on to win the 2010 Olympic gold medal in the four-man, without Kreitzburg, whose hip had begun to fail. The push athletes on Holcomb's sled had been Kreitzburg’s teammates and friends for years.

“I was in California and watched my teammates who I slid with, who I spent many years in the same sled, win a gold medal, and I had really mixed emotions,'' Kreitzburg said. “On one hand, I know that we all sacrificed to get where they were at, so I was excited for them, but also was thinking, 'That could have been me.'”

By then, Kreitzburg was in Los Angeles, attempting a career as a stuntman. His first job became a metaphor for his time in Hollywood. He was buried alive in a “CSI” episode. He said he had 12 jobs in 12 months, most of them off-camera, and frequently was so broke he didn't have gas money. As often is the case with many recently retired elite athletes, he felt lost.

“It was brutal. It was really bad. I'm not being dramatic. You lose purpose. You have no idea what you're going to do,'' said Kreitzburg, a Walsh Jesuit grad. “I was an Olympic athlete and I have my master's degree in divinity, and I have things going for me, but I couldn't find things I was passionate about. It was tough, a blow to my ego.''

Sitting on the set of “The Mentalist'' one day, he realized he had spent his life investing in his body as an elite athlete and in his wallet as a stuntman. He thought back to divinity school.

“I don't want to, at the end of my life, look back and say I just invested in myself only. I want to invest in someone else or something else,'' Kreitzburg said. "At that same time, the tsunami happened.''

Kreitzburg felt a calling. He sold everything that didn't fit in a 4x4 container and raised money to go to Japan, where he volunteered for Samaritan's Purse's relief efforts.

The agency eventually hired him as a contract employee, and he worked 13 months in Japan before being sent to a refugee camp in Yida, South Sudan. He oversaw food distribution to 70,000 refugees, most of them from Sudan who had fled fighting that eventually led to the creation of South Sudan.

Fleeing and returning

After getting married in October, Kreitzburg and Danielle, a grant analyst for Samaritan's Purse, were settling into their new jobs in South Sudan when the agency's country director took a personal leave in early December, placing Kreitzburg in charge.

“It originally was supposed to be kind of calm, because it was Christmas,'' he said. “Then the fighting broke out on the 15th and it's been craziness the last month here in South Sudan.''

Within days, it became clear Kreitzburg and his expatriate staff of 70 needed to get out of the country. Fighting that began in a military barracks in Juba, within earshot of Kreitzburg, spread across the country as troops loyal to former vice president

Riek Machar

batted the South Sudanese military in a conflict that is both ethnic and political.

Samaritan's Purse, which is based in Boone, N.C., decided to pull its expatriate staff out of South Sudan, which Kreitzburg coordinated on the ground Dec. 20-22.

“We felt it was a good opportunity to relocate our staff to Nairobi (Kenya) to understand what the security was,'' Kreitzburg said. "There was a lot of fighting popping up all around the country. The roads were not very secure.

“You develop a relationship with your team and it was heartbreaking. Most of our staff struggled with leaving our friends and coworkers in South Sudan.''

With fighting near Juba on an apparent decline, Kreitzburg and five others returned to Samaritan's Purse base compound last weekend. The mission will expand beyond refugees at three large camps to helping South Sudanese displaced by the fighting.

“All of those areas to some degree were affected by the fighting, some more than others,'' he said. “In the next few weeks, it's getting our team back in and responding immediately to the (displaced people) who don't have the basic needs, and going out and identifying the life-saving critical things they need to survive.

“Being in South Sudan is challenging, but then being in an emergency situation ramps things up again. I have a much bigger job now. You have to coordinate people relocating, making sure everyone is safe and then managing the team and starting to bring everyone back in. We're daily evaluating the security situation and figuring out what areas are safe and whether we can respond in that area or wait to see how things are going to play out

“That's very, very difficult in this conflict. It seems like things keep popping up in random places.''

Kreitzburg said if things are more calm in a month, he will try to keep up with the Olympic bobsled competition. In Africa, he's detached from the snowy peaks of Russia's Caucasus Mountains, but not entirely.

“I'm still connected,'' he said. “It may still be a bit difficult to watch them, but not as much as it was in 2010. I still have a piece of my heart in bobsledding.''

He has found the passion that no longer is about himself on a sled or TV set.

“I spent a year looking for that in Los Angeles," he said. “It's kind of cool to where my life has come back around and the Lord has really led me to Samaritan's Purse, and I find enjoyment and satisfaction in serving people and a bigger purpose than myself.''