Sarah Culberson’s story is known to many viewers of Good Morning America and CNN–How she had grown up adopted in West Virginia, used Landmark Education’s Landmark Forum program to get up the courage to look for her birth father (her birth mother had died years earlier), and discovering that she was in fact a long lost princess to a small tribe in Sierra Leone.
The story didn’t end there. When Culberson returned to her long lost home town of Bumpe, she discovered that the high school, which was a prominent West African boarding school where her father had been headmaster, and many other buildings in the town had been burned and destroyed by rebels years earlier in the brutal civil war that ended in 2002, but not before 50,000 citizens were killed. Bumpe and Sierra Leone are still recovering from the devastation.
With the aid of John Woehrle, Culberson co-founded the Kposowa Foundation, an organization to rebuild Bumpe’s schools and infrastructure, and ultimately, to assist in the rebuilding of all Sierra Leone. Culberson’s recent return to Sierra Leone showed that the Foundation’s work had been productive, many new school buildings have been rebuilt and were proudly displayed by the residents. Culberson and the Foundation aren’t stopping there; in addition to the completion of rebuilding the the remaining high school buildings, which is the current priority, they are committed to creating scholarships for students, providing bus transportation for students living in villages outside Bumpe, a clean water project, and improved an improved medical clinic and hospital facilities.
The following video, titled “Bumpenya” (lady of Bumpe) is the start of an in-progress feature length documentary which tells Culberson’s story. Also read Landmark Education News’ previous story about Sarah Culberson, and be sure to visit the the Bumpenya website.
1 comment
[…] has been recounted in other stories on Landmark Education News – read more details here, here and here. To buy a copy of Culberson’s book, go to your local book store or find it on […]