Supermodel Alek Wek is not feeling the hunger games being played by the Western World.
Now living in Brooklyn after emigrating from the UK, the Sudanese born Wek is on a mission to educate school children, locally and via Skype, about the devastating famine in the Horn of Africa.
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“What I found was heartening. The kids listened. They questioned. They asked what they could do,” Wek told Newsweek. “Now I’m going to start talking to schoolkids around the world, through Skype. We all have different backgrounds, different relationships with each other, and with the food we eat. But there’s one thing we all share: We eat to nurture ourselves, to feel stronger. We eat to live.”
Wek, too, has known hunger amidst a rain of bullets.
“I know how it feels to go hungry…My parents, my eight siblings, and I survived on food our mother had grown in the yard: vegetables, grains, peanuts. We shared what little we had with the neighbors—those who hadn’t disappeared. It’s an awful feeling, being hungry.
Today, I live in the U.S., where restaurants serve huge portions on even huger platters, and people are tempted to eat too much. Many live to eat, instead of the other way around. In restaurants in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I always ask for a doggie bag, to bring the leftovers home. My ex-boyfriend suggested more than once that I cut this out, as he found it embarrassing. (Perhaps that’s why he is no longer my boyfriend.) I told him, “What’s embarrassing is that I should have so much more than others.”
Take, for instance, the Horn of Africa—the cluster of countries that neighbor my native Sudan. Nearly a million refugees have fled the famine in Somalia, seeking help from camps in Kenya and surrounding countries. These people have less than nothing; mothers don’t have enough breast milk to nurse their children.
Read more of Wek’s insight into eating and famine by clicking the links below. We support Wek’s ongoing quest to battle hunger throughout the world.
SOURCE: Newseek/DailyBeast
