Supermodel Alek Wek visits refugee camp in hometown Sudan

NIDA DAR

KARACHI: Supermodel Alek Wek paid an emotional visit to a refugee camp in her South Sudan
hometown to mark its independence

Wek is busy in pacing the catwalks of London, New York, Paris and Milan, wearing branded
clothes costing high amount of money.

However, the South Sudanese supermodel has proved she is not going to forget her humble and
often traumatic beginnings in a hurry.

The former North African refugee has made an emotional return to her homeland, her first
since 2005, to mark the first anniversary of the country's independence.

The trip flashed plenty of painful childhood memories.

The 35-year-old beauty fled her hometown of Wau with her family as a teenager during the
1991 civil war between government forces and rebels.

The journey was a gruelling one in which Wek along-with her family foraged for food, used
the sun to navigate, and were sometimes forced to spend whole months in villages and stretches of days shut inside huts when the warfare around them became too dangerous.

Alek Wek's beloved father died along the way, but she, her mother and her sister made it to London when she was 14, and there they finally sought asylum.

She was spotted by a modelling scout for Models 1 in an outdoor market in Crystal Palace in
1995.

She became the first black woman to appear on the cover of Elle magazine in 1997.

Visiting the 35,000-strong refugee camp of Yusuf Batil in Upper Nile state, Wek said it was
difficult listening to the upsetting stories of people who reminded her of herself as a
young girl.

“It choked me up because I remembered walking through the bush...and eating whatever we
found, and my mom knowing what greens were poisonous and which ones were not,” she said
talking to the media.

Wek, who is a member of the Dinka tribe and part of the US committee for refugees' advisory
council, visited Sudan with the UN refugee agency UNHCR.