“I always wanted to be a model, but I never thought that I could actually be one,” 20-year-old Adhar Abiem says, “it was considered to be something completely out of my league.” For many of us, modeling is often seen as something that is beyond us – it’s artificial, unreal, imaginary. There is the artistic element to it, which gives it this ethereal feeling, but there’s also the humane side to it that can empower and amplify different voices and faces. For a refugee like Adhar, who left her home in South Sudan due to the ongoing war and came to Egypt in 2014 to continue her studies, walking in the streets is a struggle on its own. “Going to school or even to the grocery store is a struggle, because I hear racial slurs nearly every day. I remember one day going to school with my friend and someone threw something at us and yelled derogatory terms in Arabic and his friends laughed. Sometimes they even reach out and pull our hair, then laugh and run,” she says. But the modeling job, according to her, helped change all of…
From Refugee to Fashion Model: Adhar Abiem’s Story in Egypt
August 31, 2020
