Alek Wek journeys to South Sudan to raise awareness of refugees' plight: 'This is inspiring'

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Rhoda told the supermodel, “‘As long as we have our country, we have our land, we are forever grateful for any little bit that we have; we just want to be able to cultivate it, to be able to sustain ourselves,'” Wek said. “And that’s it.”

She credits UNHCR with helping to inspire this positive spirit. “I appreciate and have a tremendous amount of respect for organizations that I align myself with such as UNHCR[.] They don’t just go there and just save lives,” the catwalker intoned. “They’re not just like, ‘We’ll come and we’ll take over.’ They actually work along side with the community. They actually encourage the community to empower themselves… which is the way to do it. The community doesn’t want any handouts; they want to be self-sustained.”

The refugee advocate simultaneously acknowledged that South Sudan, at only one year old, has many hurdles to surmount before achieving self-sufficiency.

“It’s just one year,” Wek said of South Sudan’s growing pains. “You have to give a little bit of a pat on the back regarding just how much it’s grown; but I think we need a lot of infrastructure to build a nation. You need all the other areas; you need the doctors, you need the lawyers, you need the teachers, you need the scientists; you need all the other aspects. That’s why I gave an example of people coming back to the country. I try and play, in my small way, a role to help rebuild the community.”

Tooze added that the country desperately needs emergency funds to help sustain and ameliorate the refugees’ situation, but Wek hopes to encourage the world to see her country as she does: wealthy with opportunities that investors will properly assess.

“It’s so rich, you know, anything can grow in the south,” Wek said proudly of the region of her birth. “It’s rich in natural resources.”

“If we can be able to think, ‘we’re not just giving, but actually we’re getting, investing,'” Wek said of South Sudan’s positive potential, “it’s an investment where you actually gain, because it’s a meaningful investment; if I buy something and I know even 50 percent is going to go towards the cause of helping another fellow human being, I will be more than happy to pay.”

Investment in human capital is what Wek wants for her countrymen and women who she observed on her journey home doing everything they could to spur growth. Leaders are investing in education. Foriegn-educated South Sudanese are returning to start businesses. Even the returnees are plowing the strips of land around their tents to grow their own food, starting towards the path of material independence that South Sudan’s political emancipation has traced.

However, to reach that path, those struggling in the camps need immediate assistance to lift them out of squalor. “The UNHCR has made an emergency appeal to the nations and the large corporate donors of the world of $220,000,000 to support the reintegration of these refugees into the new country,” Tooze said. “So far, only 20 percent of this goal has been met, largely from donations from the U.S. government.”

This means that more donor countries and corporations must contribute soon, to prevent the tide of suffering occurring in the camps from getting worse. Wek is doing everything she can to start these monies flowing to those in South Sudan who need it most.

But don’t think of it as charity work in her case.

“It’s not giving back,” Wek said. “This is inspiring.”

Follow Alexis Garrett Stodghill on Twitter at @lexisb.