A model of modesty Alek Wek grew up in a Sudanese town wearing second-hand clothes and drinking rainwater -- and she was one of the better off. Those early memories help to keep her feet on the ground now that she has found fame and fortune as a supermodel, says Ciara Dwyer.
Alek Wek glides into the Merrion Hotel looking every inch the supermodel that she is. A giraffe of a woman, her legs are so long that they look like stilts. Her black skin shines with the essence of health. Everyone is spellbound; yet the Sudan-born model is oblivious to the effect her beauty has on people.
Supermodels are a rare breed, but Alek Wek is a different breed again. Imagine a model without vanity and devoid of a monstrous ego. Sounds impossible. But so too does the story of her life.
Alek was born in Sudan in 1977, the seventh of nine children. She grew up in a town called Wau (pronounced "wow"), where, according to her autobiography, Alek, she lived a happy, middle-class life.
"We didn't live in a shack like the people on the outskirts of Wau," she says. "It was a house with a veranda and two bedrooms. The boys slept in one room and the girls in the other. I was a city girl."
Each morning, her father went to work at the Board of Education in his suit and tie, and with a briefcase in hand. The children would go to school and Alek's mother would walk to the local market to shop for vegetables.
But the concept of status is relative. Middle class in Wau is not the same as it is in any Western city.
"The middle class in the town was made up of doctors, teachers and government workers who lived in houses made of stone and zinc. There were plenty of people poorer than us, who lived in neighbourhoods where the houses had thatched roofs and the adults worked in the fields or did other hard labour ... I always felt very comfortable with what we had, although most people in Europe or America would have called us poor, since we didn't have electricity, or an indoor toilet."
They had no running water; instead they had to walk to the nearest Unicef pump. They bought second-hand clothes from markets -- the same clothes that people in wealthy countries dump into collection boxes. And yet it was a contented life, where her father would listen to the BBC World Service on his wind-up radio and her mother gave each of the children a job to do.
"We had enough to eat, a solid house and simple clothes. For that we felt fortunate."
(continued in The Independent )
