Saint Cyr Dimanche’s long journey from Africa to the Boston Marathon

Brandeis University News

BOSTON (CBS) — “I was in the hospital for six months alone. That’s where my journey started to come to America.”
Today, Saint Cyr Dimanche is a 23-year-old son of two loving parents in Worcester, studying international relations at Brandeis University. But he traveled a long and difficult road to get to where he is.
After losing his mother in childbirth and his father at the hands of rebels when he was 14, Dimanche escaped from a small village in the Central African Republic to Cameroon. He supported himself by hauling cement, sometimes carrying it up 10 floors, earning $1.80 for 12 hours of hard labor. It eventually became too much for the young boy.
He ended up getting sick, and spent those six months in the hospital. While he was there, a visit from an American couple on a social service mission started the process that would bring him to the US. Dimanche was 17 when he arrived at Logan Aiport, with Bob and Anne Bureau waiting for him.
“We called him our son from the first moment we met him,” said Mr. Bureau. “And he will always be our son. Always.”
“He came through baggage claim and I started crying,” said Mrs. Bureau. “I went up and hugged him.”
Adding a 17-year-old to your family would be a tough task for any family, but it was even harder considering the Bureaus and Dimanche had no way of communicating. Dimanche spoke Sango (a rare African language) and a little bit of French, but he and his new family had no common language. They used iPhones to translate before they found a translator.
Then Dimanche took his next step a few weeks later. After not attending school from 2003-2011, he returned to the classroom.
“It was very hard to go back to school. It was also very hard that I started with a different language,” ...

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