Our story began in 1994, with the Lost Boys of South Sudan who had resettled in Grand Rapids, MI.
South Sudan Leadership and Community Development (SSLCD) began in 1994 in Grand Rapids Michigan as an effort of some of the Lost Boys of Sudan who had resettled in the area to assist the people still living in the Kiir Village where they had been forced to flee as young children. From the beginning, the effort was primarily to empower the people of this village by helping them prioritize their needs and work together as a community to achieve them, with assistance from SSLCD to meet needs that could not be met with their own resources.
A pivotal moment in SSLCD’s development came in a meeting with some of the women leaders of the village when we asked how they gave birth to their children. Their answer has always stuck with us: They said simply, “With God.” They explained that they had no assistance of any kind; they went into their tukuls alone with whatever supplies they had on hand. We realized why South Sudan had the highest maternal/child mortality rate in the world, and that empowerment of these women had to start by empowering them to improve the birth process. This led to subsequent efforts to assist these women to improve many aspects of their community.
In December 2013, the latest civil war broke out in South Sudan. All of Kiir village was forced to flee to Uganda where they settled in refugee camps set up by the UN. Since then, our work has been focused on two nearby refugee settlements, Mungula and Oula, where most of the people from Kiir Village are now living.