The Cush Foundation
The Cush Foundation was created in 2004 by twelve "Lost Boys" who moved to Jonesboro, Arkansas in 2002 after Victoria Rampley watched the "CBS 60 Minutes" program about the the "Lost Boys of South Sudan."
The story about the "Lost Boys" losing their families at such a young age touched her heart. The boys became orphans in the mid-1980's and created their own families of other "Lost Boys" who lived in villages while walking to find someone who would care for them.
The "CBS 60 Minutes" program told of a United Nations plan to bring some of the "Lost Boys" to America to start a new life, however, they would need people and sponsers to help them. Victoria called and offered help through the company Arkansas Glass Container Corporation in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
Three of the twelve, Isaac, Abraham, and David were the first. They moved into a small house near the plant and started working right away. There were many things to learn in a new country and the challenges were tremendous but considered blessings by these orphaned young adults. They would say that "God has a plan and we are blessed because he loves us."
After the first three young men got settled in, the remaining brothers found their way to Jonesboro; Gabriel, Simon, Jacob, Peter, Joseph, Ajak, Paul, Marko, Michael, and Achrille. Once all brothers were living in Jonesboro, working at Arkansas Glass Container, and going to Arkansas State University they banded together to create "The Cush Foundation", a non-profit foundation to help those families they left behind in South Sudan.
Many donations have been given to "The Cush Foundation" but the first seed money started with an elementary school in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, called Colter Elementary. In 2004, "The Cush Foundation" officers flew to Jackson Hole and recieved the money from the students. Since 2004, the students have been donating money every year from their apple sales every fall.
Today the seed money is at work. Joseph left for South Sudan in May 2012 and is working with the local "Bor" village commissioners to aquire the land for the first well to be drilled and a community center to be built by "The Cush Foundation"
"Lost Boys"
The "lost boys of Sudan" are a group of refugees named after Peter Pan's cadre of orphans who clung together to escape a hostile adult world. Some 23,000 Sudanese boys and some girls were forced by violence from their southern Sudan villages since the mid-1980's. Sudan, which is located in North East Africa, has experienced brutal civil war fueled by religious, ehtnic and regional strive.
The current phase of the civil war began in 1983, pitting the main rebel army, the Sudan Peoples's Liberation Army (SPLA) and its allies against the government's military and its allies. Since 1983 this warfare has left neraly 4,5 million Sudanese uprooted from their homes.
Combatants on all sides have targeted and exploited civilian populations. A 1998 study by the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR) estimated that 1.9 million people in southern and central Sudan had died of war-related causes since 1983.
Fleeing the violence and bloodshed of Sudan's internal conflict, these innocent children experienced mind-numbing horrors and intense hardship. They walked hundreds of miles in search of peace and then spent over nine years in a Kenyan reguee camp. Today 3,400 "lost boys" are already in the United States or on their way here and settling in cities throughout the country.
Most of the "lost boys" are from the Dinka, Nuer and some are from other tribes of Sothern Sudan, where hundreds of villages have been burned, livestock stolen and families decimated. The systematic destruction and violence is considered one of the century's most brutal wars. According to the U.S. State Department estimates the combination of war, famine and diease in southern Sudan has killes more than 2 million people and displaced another 4 milion.
As government troops blazed through southern Sudan -- reportedly killing the adults and enslaving the girls --- scattered groups of suddenly orphaned boys converged and headed toward Ethiopia, where they hoped to find peace and their families again. Trekking hundreds of miles on foot through the hostile East African desert, Miraculously, thousands survived the ordeal of the late 1980's, finding refuge in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. There, the childern - mostly boys- formed their own "family" groups, wih older children the "lost boys" after Peter Pan's lost boys.
The orphaned boys and some girls trekked almost endlessly through sub-Saharan heat and wilderness.Those who survived walked for more than a year back through Sudan to Kenya, a destination for thousands of African regugees forced out of their homes by war or natural disaster. Emaciated, dehydrated and parentless, only half of the original boys -- some 10,000 who survived the journey --- arrived at Kakuma Reguee Camp in 1992. The majority of them were between the ages of 8 and 18 (Most of the boys don't know for sure how old they are; aid workers assigned them appoximate ages after they arrived in Kenya).
On arriving to the United States in 1999, the UNHCR the UN Refugee Agency, working with in collaboration with the U.S, Department od State, referred over 3,400 of these youth to the U.S. for resettlement processing.