Thon Luony, playing on a student visa from the Sudan, warms up for a game at a community college in Miami, FL.
The Boston Globe printed an eye-opening story Sunday on the recruiting of athletes from Africa to play at schools in the United States. Boys leave horrific situations in countries such as the Sudan in hopes of earning a living playing a game in the America, only to be pushed around and taken advantage of by self-serving American institutions:
When the dream makers found them, one boy was living barefoot in an Ethiopian refugee camp, the other languishing on the streets of an émigré enclave in Australia.
Both boys were Sudanese. And both were very tall.
Play basketball in America, the men urged them, and seize your dreams: education, housing, food, and clothing, all expenses paid. Maybe even a shot at the National Basketball Association.
The two refugees, like dozens of athletic African youths shepherded to US shores by basketball recruiters associated with American nonprofit charities, arrived with little more than the shirts on their backs and starry visions of new lives in a land of plenty.
Instead, Thon Luony and Mathiang Muo tumbled into a group some are calling the new Lost Boys of Sudan – young Afri can basketball prospects bounced by their sponsors from state to state and school to school, sometimes substandard schools where basketball is the main object and academics are sketchy. Some, like Luony, fear deportation if they protest. Many wind up feeling manipulated and betrayed, but also wary of losing the support of those who promised to help them.
