Salva Dut
Walked a thousand miles fleeing war as a boy, then walked back to dig wells
Salva Dut was eleven years old in 1985 when war reached his village in what is now South Sudan and he fled with a group of other boys, walking hundreds of miles across the country to refugee camps in Ethiopia and later Kenya. Thousands of boys made similar journeys; many died of hunger, exhaustion or animal attacks along the way. Those who survived became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Salva spent roughly a decade in camps before being resettled in Rochester, New York, in 1996, where he learned English and found work.
Years later he discovered that his father, whom he had long assumed dead, was alive back home but seriously ill from drinking contaminated water. That news pushed him to found Water for South Sudan in 2003, returning to drill boreholes in villages that had never had a safe water source. The organisation trains local well-maintenance teams so that wells keep working after the drilling crews leave, and has since put clean water within reach of hundreds of thousands of people.
His story became widely known through Linda Sue Park's novel A Long Walk to Water, which is now taught in schools across the United States, giving him a platform he has used to keep raising money for wells.