About Us

When I was in sixth grade, I read a book called A Long Walk to Water with my class. Immediately, I was drawn to the topic. This book is a true story about a boy named Salva Dut, who was one of the Sudanese Lost Boys during the second Sudanese civil war from 1983-2005. He was born in 1974, in between the first and second civil wars. As an 11- year-old boy, he was a leader of 20,0000 lost boys, who journeyed without their families across the warring nation, which landed Salva in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Salva was one of the lucky few who made it to the United States in 1996. Salva then started an organization called Water for South Sudan, which drills wells in the peaceful areas of the still heavily divided nation.

Since the organization’s establishment in 2005, 300 wells have been drilled in remote, peaceful regions of the nation formed in 2011. The drilling of these wells has allowed women and girls to get educated, simply because they don’t have to walk for 8 hours a day to get dirty river water for their families. Hospitals and schools spring up around these wells, which can also be a gateway out of poverty. Life expectancy also increases because people do not get sick from dysentery and other waterborne illness.