‘Lost Boys’ in Everett feel kinship with Olympian

Published 11:31 pm Friday, August 8, 2008

EVERETT — James Bior says he’s not a runner.

The last time he seriously sprinted was more than 20 years ago, when he dashed, with a group of other young boys, from hiding place to hiding place under the cover of night.

They were running in desperation, because Arab militias from northern Sudan were setting fire to their villages and snatching the boys up to brainwash them into being child soldiers.

They were running because they were young, and they could. Bior, like the others with him, watched the weak fall away and die. But they kept running, because they had to.

They were running because there was nothing else to be done.

Somewhere in the desert, among the thousands of boys running for their lives, was Lopez Lomong, a boy just a bit younger than Bior. On Friday, Lomong, now a world-class 1,500-meter runner, led the U.S. team into the Olympic opening ceremonies in Beijing.

For Bior and thousands of others who became known as Sudan’s “Lost Boys” when they came to the U.S. as refugees in 2001, running is finally something to celebrate.

Resettlement agencies sent Lomong to upstate New York and Bior to Everett when they arrived in the U.S. The two don’t know one another personally, but the brotherhood forged in east Africa’s deserts is as strong as the gold medal Lomong hopes to carry home from Beijing.

“I want to see the way he runs,” Bior said, his voice still heavily accented by Dinka, the Lost Boys’ native language. “This makes me feel so proud of him.”

Bior works swing shift as a janitor at Providence Everett Medical Center’s Colby Campus. When Lomong competes, Bior plans to pull his coworkers into a break room to watch.

Lomong and Bior had the same beginning: a frantic, months-long race through the desert, then years in a squalid refugee camp in Kenya. In the late 1990s, U.S. and international refugee advocates began working on a plan to bring the Lost Boys, most of whom had nowhere to go because their families had been killed, to the U.S. In 2001, the boys lined up to register for their chance, but faced yet another challenge. Most rural Sudanese parents track their children’s birth by attaching it to an event, such as the season of good crops, the year of the flood, or the day the Sudanese military rolled through town.

Registration clerks set Bior’s birthdate as Jan. 1, 1975. They told him he was 25.

Bior believes he was younger than 10 when he ran from Sudan.

“We cried at night in the desert,” he said. “We know we were just boys, because of those tears.”

Bior guesses that his real age now is about mid-20s, not 33 as his official identification states.

Most of the Lost Boys were given ages too old to be placed in foster homes when they arrived in the U.S.

“They were very young adults, but when they arrived they had to do what any refugee has to do,” said Annie Wilson, a vice president at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which resettled Lost Boys in 2001. “Some of it was because of the chaos of the camp, and the way people ended up with records was not always super-scientific.”

Only about 500 of the total 3,000 Lost Boys were given birth dates that designated them to be under the age of 18. Lomong was one of those. He was taken in by a foster family in Tully, N.Y.

“The road was much harder for the ones who arrived as adults,” Wilson said.

Bior was placed in an apartment in north Everett with four other Lost Boys. They all enrolled in English as a Second Language classes and eventually took classes at Everett Community College. Bior is still a student there, carefully balancing his household bills with his studies. He became a U.S. citizen in February.

Those five men placed in Everett still live together, in the same spare apartment.

Few refugee groups have inspired as much compassion and interest as the Lost Boys, Wilson said.

Many of the Lost Boys have become vocal advocates of the people of Sudan, including Lomong, who is involved with Team Darfur, an athlete’s organization dedicated to ending that region’s civil war. The Chinese government is a primary buyer of Sudanese oil, which critics say is akin to sponsoring the conflict in Darfur.

Other Lost Boys have written memoirs, and several films about the group have been produced, including “God Grew Tired of Us,” winner of the Grand Jury Audience prize at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

“Your heart goes out to a group of children that are living and surviving together without adults,” she said. “To think that this kid is carrying the flag in Beijing, that’s really moving. It tells an extraordinary story of the United States. It connects us to the core of at least who we want to be.”

Bior wants to enroll in a university when he graduates from community college.

After that, he’s not sure what he’ll do. It’s a challenge to pay the bills and set money aside to send to his brother still in Kenya. He also sends money to his father, whom he tracked down a few years ago after assuming he was dead.

For Bior, just living in the U.S. is success.

“We feel like we’re in heaven,” he said. “They told us where we were going, and when we saw the plane, we were very happy. We knew then for sure that we are going to America.”

Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.