ROCHESTER, N.Y. – Kevin Horner-Richardson peered at his computer screen, hoping to catch a glimpse of his daughter during the East Coast Conference Women's Cross Country Championship Race.

He saw her run by briefly early in the 5-kilometer competition and then spent a good deal of time staring at the finish line with no runners in sight.

"I was just sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting," he said. "I hadn't started my timer and there wasn't a clock showing on the stream, so I didn't really even know how long it had been. And then, way off in the distance, I saw somebody come around the corner into the straightaway and I thought, 'That could be her.' As she got closer and closer, I was like, 'Oh, yeah, that's her,' and there was nobody behind her. I was so excited."

His excitement soon turned to joy on the morning of Oct. 25 as Rachel Horner-Richardson, a senior at Roberts Wesleyan University, crossed the finish line first at Sunken Meadow State Park, erasing the disappointment of second-place finishes the past two seasons. Rachel's time of 18:43.90 was nearly 20 seconds faster than runner-up and teammate Paige Reeser.

"It felt amazing just to know I finally clinched a win," said Rachel, who led the Redhawks to their 11th straight ECC title and will compete in the NCAA Division II National Championships Saturday in Kenosha, Wis. "I just didn't have the issues that I had the previous years, and I could feel the combination of everything I worked for coming together and being able to make my parents and my team proud."

Rachel has done that and more throughout a college running career that has seen her qualify for nationals in cross country four times while winning nine individual ECC Championships, setting the school record in the 5,000-meter run and earning All-Region recognition 13 times with her final indoor and outdoor seasons still to come.

"She's definitely one of the best front-runners that we've had," said Andrew Dorr, Roberts Wesleyan's Director of Cross Country & Track and Field. "What makes Rachel unique is her ability to dial it up when the gun goes off."

Rachel's competitive nature is not the only attribute that sets her apart. Her unlikely 7,000-mile journey from Ethiopia to the United States is a story of strength, perseverance and faith.

'Life there was very hard'

Rachel's story begins near Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

The second of three children, she was raised by her mother and grandmother in a small city and has few memories of her father.  A member of the Oromo, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, she was called upon to work as a shepherd at a very young age.

"In our small community, everyone has their own roles just because individually you're not going to be able to have those resources on your own," Rachel said. "As a kid, that was one of my roles. I'd go out with the sheep all day in the field and watch them so something bad didn't happen to them."

When Rachel was 5 or 6, her exact age is not known because her tribe did not keep birth dates, she and her younger sister Lily were sent to live in an orphanage in Addis Ababa, a city with a population of nearly six million people.

"Part of the reason that we got sent to the orphanage was because, in that society, women don't have a lot to bring to the family," Rachel said. "When you go days without eating, it's hard to parse out the food. Girls may not be able to bring anything to the family in the sense of helping to find food. Life there was very hard. You just tried to survive every day."

Despite the difficult living conditions, Rachel, who was not yet 8 years old, did everything that she could to assist Lily and the other children in the orphanage, including feeding and helping them get dressed.

"I remember a lot about the orphanage," she said. "Going to school there and just living with a bunch of other kids. I tended to be the older kid just because a lot of times when you reach a certain age in the orphanage, you get kicked to the streets because they have few resources. Once you reach around 12, you kind of run out of time in the orphanage."

'We can try to make a difference'

As time ticked away on Rachel and Lily's stay in the orphanage, Kevin and his wife, Deborah, prayed.

The Horner-Richardsons, who had raised seven biological children in their New Hampshire home, were approaching age 50 and had reached a point in life where they wanted to share their blessings with others.

They just didn't know the best way to do it, so they leaned on their faith.

"Our relationship with God is the bedrock of our lives and of the way we raised our family," Deborah said.

That foundation led them to a decision.

"There was a point where we said, 'We can try to make a difference,'" Kevin said. "We can try to go somewhere as a missionary and try to make a difference in a bunch of people's lives or we could adopt two children and try to make a massive difference in two people's lives, and that's what's happened."

Adoption is a complicated process, especially for people Kevin and Deborah's age.

Ethiopia was one of the few countries that would allow the Horner-Richardsons to adopt siblings, so they traveled to Addis Ababa in December of 2010 and met Rachel and Lily for the first time at the orphanage.

"In order to adopt a child from Ethiopia, you've got to go twice," Kevin, a retired engineer, said. "Once to set the wheels in motion and meet with the judge, and a second time to take them to U.S. Embassy and get all of the citizenship and U.S. adoption paperwork done."

Kevin and Deborah returned to Ethiopia in late February and, with their prayers answered and paperwork completed, began the long trip home with Rachel and Lily.

Whole new world

After spending nearly two years in the orphanage, Rachel and Lily left Addis Ababa. The 23-hour flight included stops in Istanbul and Washington, D.C., before landing in Hartford.

"Everything is just kind of a shock to you because you don't really know where you're being taken to because we had been in a very specific environment in Ethiopia," Rachel said. "The plane trip was very long, so I don't remember a lot of that. I just remember really being obsessed with my dad's camera because we didn't have a lot of technology, so I was on it the whole time."

An uncle met the family at the airport to drive them home but, before getting in the car for the 2-hour and 15-minute ride, Rachel went outside and did something she had never done before - tasted snow.

"We got to the U.S and I ate some very dirty snow," she recalled. "I remember sleeping in the car and when I woke up my now adoptive mom was driving. That just came as a shock to me because in Ethiopia women generally don't drive, so that was one of the new things that I noticed."

It was far from the only thing.

"One of the things that was hard to adjust to is how much food was in the house," Rachel said. "My mom tells me that the first week or two, Lily and I would carry tons of food in our shirt, just because you don't know when that food's going to go away.  So, that was one of the things we still laugh about, that we used to carry bananas and apples and bread around the house."

Rachel and Lily continued to adjust to their new surroundings, including having seven new brothers and sisters. Anna, the Horner-Richardson's eldest biological child, recently turned 38 and is 20 years older than Lily. Ivy, the youngest, is about two years older than Rachel.

About six weeks after her arrival in the U.S., Rachel showed Deborah her love for athletics when they went to her first softball practice.

"I had no sooner turned the car off and she was out that door and she ran over to introduce herself to the coach," Deborah said. "She could barely speak English, but she didn't care about anything but learning what to do next. She is truly an athlete. There's nothing she's ever picked up by way of sports that she hasn't excelled at."

As she did with most of her older children, Deborah, initially home-schooled Rachel and Lily. Rachel, who was a couple of grade levels behind in English and math, then began attending a one-room, multi-grade school where she could work at her own pace. By the time she had completed eighth grade she had closed the gap academically.

"Rachel is a survivor," Deborah said. "She is incredibly resilient. The things that she went through as a child could have really wounded some people, but God has given her a resilience that allowed her to use those things to grow stronger."

Reluctant runner

Rachel entered high school at Mid-Vermont Christian School, a private institution in White River Junction, with every intention of continuing to play soccer and basketball.

In fact, she spent two seasons as the only female member of the school's boys soccer team.

"They didn't have a girls team," she said. "I loved playing soccer and it was great being on the guys team, even though I was the only girl. It didn't really bother me that much and I became friends with all the guys, so that was great."

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mid-Vermont lost several players to graduation and could not field a soccer team. Rachel begrudgingly decided to try cross country in order to stay in shape for basketball.

"My parents were like, 'Well, why don't you try doing cross country? We think you'd be really good at it,'" she said. "I was like, 'No, I'm not doing that, I'm never doing that.'

"It's so boring, it's such an individual sport, and I don't want to run because running is a punishment that coach makes us do."

It wasn't long before that punishment became a passion.

"I did way better than I thought and my coaches really wanted me to run again," Rachel said. "So, I did that senior year and then I decided to do it in college."

The road to Roberts

Rachel, who finished sixth in the Vermont Division 3 State Championships as a senior, wanted to attend a Christian college with a strong nursing program that was located within six hours of Cornish, which is on the New Hampshire-Vermont border.

She visited three colleges that fit those criteria during her junior year of high school but none of them felt quite right. Her mother, recalling that several home-schooled students that she knew attended and spoke highly of Roberts Wesleyan, suggested that she take a look.

Eventually, a phone interview with Dorr was arranged.

"I think I was probably a little more enthusiastic about it than she was," Kevin said. "She didn't really think she wanted to or was good enough to run, and I just felt like she had it in her genes. She's just a runner. She runs like a gazelle."

The conversation was enough for Rachel to give Roberts a chance.

 "She came from a really, really small team and she didn't have much experience at all," Dorr said. "She didn't even know what an interval session is, which is probably the most common running workout example that everybody knows, when she first started training."

It took all of one race, the 2022 Harry F. Anderson Invitational, for the Redhawks to realize that Rachel, who was Roberts' No. 2 runner that day, was going to be special.

"We could recognize the talent right from the get-go," Dorr says. "By that Homecoming race at that first meet, she had kind of set the stage for all that was to come."

Rachel finished fourth at the ECC Championships and ninth at the NCAA Division II East Regionals that fall and has been improving ever since. She collected her first ECC individual title in the indoor 5,000 that winter and has captured that event at the conference level six straight seasons.

Fueled by an uncanny desire to succeed, she set the school record in the outdoor 5K (17:28:20) in May and placed second at the East Regionals for the second straight year on Nov. 8

"I've always been very competitive," she said. "It could really be in anything, but I think sports is where that really comes out. I've done two sports a season my whole life, and running is exactly the same. My competitive nature comes out in racing, and I don't really see anything else or hear anything else because I'm very zoned in and have a goal."

"She's just determined," teammate Gianna Tribotte said. "She doesn't start off too cocky in races. She kind of works her way up, asserts her position and then just takes the win if she feels comfortable. She doesn't do anything too early or too late. She knows when to make her move, she's very calculated."

She's team-oriented, too. 

"Rachel's a fun teammate, she's always lifting up her peers and other people on the team," Tribotte says. "She's humble. She has had a lot of success, and she really uses that to lift other people up and cheer them on."

While also lifting up the credit.

"She definitely keeps Jesus at the center of it and just wants to bring the glory to him," teammate and roommate Lydia Roselund said.

Connecting with kids

One place that Rachel, who hopes to become a pediatric nurse, relaxes is around children.

Dorr and his wife, Jennifer, the Redhawks assistant cross country and distance coach, have three sons ages 9, 6 and 4.

"She loves my boys," Dorr says. "She's like my boys' big sister even to the point where I might at some point in time say here at practice, 'OK, kids,' and be talking to Rachel and my three boys all at the same time. She is just so fun-loving and so silly with them that she just meets them where they're at in a way that I can't."

"When she's with them, it's like nobody else is there," Roselund says. "I'll be like, 'Rachel, Rachel,' and she'll just be like focused on them. She's so good with them and playful with them. It's just cool to see."

Rachel has held a job as a nanny during her summers back home and cherishes every moment that she can with the Dorr brothers.

"I just naturally gravitate to kids and there's just a bright spot in every practice whenever they come," she said.

"Kids just love her and she's really, really good with kids," her father said. "I think it comes from growing up and sort of being the mother to her sister, who is three years younger, and growing up in an orphanage where there was just a whole bunch of kids. She just connects with kids really well."

'It's just amazing to see'

Rachel will run her final cross-country race as a Redhawk on Saturday, and she will do it with gratitude.

"It means a lot to me because this is not a sport that I chose for myself, it's something that God chose for me," she said. "I really do thank God for where he brought me and I'm very, very grateful for people like Coach, who pushes me. He's one of the big reasons that I have achieved the goals I have. So are my teammates, because whenever I don't want to run in practice they are the ones who always keep me going. I think being aware of all those things that have brought me success, it's just very humbling and it also has made running such a big part of my life where I might not have seen it."

She is also thankful for Kevin and Deborah and all that they have done.

"They've given me infinite opportunities that I never thought were possible," Rachel said. "Just getting to come here and experience life here and so many things that my friends back in Ethiopia did not get the chance to do. I'm mostly grateful to them for introducing me to Jesus. They don't just talk about Jesus, but they live it day in and day out, and that's just been the best blessing ever. I couldn't have asked for better parents."

Parents who are grateful that they trusted in the power of prayer to make a massive difference in the lives of others.

"I have no doubt that had Rachel and Lily not been adopted by somebody that they would be on the streets in Addis Ababa," Kevin said. "It would be terrible. But, the story we're having is the result of God's hand in leading us from there to here, and it's just amazing to see."