Success Stories

Journey from South Sudan to the United States

The Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan, as the Sudanese refugees are sometimes known, are survivors of Africa's longest civil war. Following the ethnic cleansing campaign by the National Islamic Front in 1987, 16,000 children from Southern Sudan were orphaned or separated from their families. They fled from their ravaged villages, enduring hunger, thirst, sickness, exhaustion, attacks by wild animals, and aerial bombardments by government forces. Many of the survivors eventually ended up at Kakuma, a U.N. refugee camp in Kenya, where for years they lived on meager rations of food and water and endured daily miseries. In 2001, the United States began resettling thousands of these young people-mostly young men-across the United States including Colorado. Their story is an incredible one. CSSAW helps support 18 of these Sudanese women in Boulder, Colorado.