A Week in the Life - Alek Wek: Passion model on the catwalk

FRIDAY FOUND Alek Wek, unusually, at home in her New York studio flat. The place is a little small for her now. Not primarily because her status as a top model demands something grander, but because she has a large family - including eight brothers and sisters - and she would like to be able to put them up when they visit. She is in the process of buying an apartment in Brooklyn, with a couple more rooms, and the purchase will represent the latest stage in a remarkable journey.

Seven years ago, she was a teenager living with her family in Wao, in the heart of southern Sudan's war zone. She escaped the bombs and bullets by sneaking alone on to a Hercules plane full of refugees bound for Khartoum. From there, through a sister, she found asylum in England.

She has been modelling since she was spotted, at the age of 18, in a London street by an agency talent scout who asked if she could take a picture of her. "I'm not the sort of girl to meet people in the street and just chat away with them, but she was really sweet. I told my mother about it and she wasn't sure as she wanted me to study. Three days later the agent called me and I went to see her."

ON SATURDAY, Ms Wek crossed the Atlantic to London. She has the coal dark skin of the Dinkas, but finds relaxed racial attitudes at either end of what has become something of a commuting run for her. "At school in England, there used to be a lot of comments about my skin colour but it was only because they had never seen anybody that dark. In New York, people would ask `Which part of Africa are you from?' Now, the people from the fashion industry don't take me for the Sudanese black model. They perceive me as Alek. When they want to book me, they say Naomi is Naomi, Kate is Kate and Alek is Alek."

Her schedule can be exhausting. Soon after touching down in London: "I dropped my bag, had a shower, got my details, then back in the car and I started the fittings with 10 appointments and request castings. The next day the shows started. I've been doing three to four shows a day ... "

Clearly, however, she still finds time to think. "I enjoy the work very much. People should be able to do something where they are not going to sacrifice themselves, their emotions and their dignity. The most important thing is to do something that you are passionate about. I don't just want to grab anything. Everything that I do, I have a passion to do it." She looks askance at colleagues in the business who see everything in their lives as determined by their looks. "Maybe it has to do with where I'm coming from," she says.

TUESDAY, and Alek is at a show in London's Brick Lane, not far from the Hackney school where she started to study in English rather than Arabic, and made her first acquaintance with the English literature that she now intends to study to degree level. She is wearing a knee-length duvet coat, jeans and sneakers, and a little red woollen hat. "I don't really dress up too much," she confides. And what about her diet? "I like fish, okra, rice. I don't drink or smoke, but I eat a lot of sweets."

So what is her proudest achievement? Working for Gucci? Fendi? Jean Paul Gaultier? Vivienne Westwood? Alexander McQueen? Ralph Lauren? Well, none of these really. "I'm really proud and thankful that I've got out of my country and that I have my family here. My family is the most important thing to me. If my mother hadn't encouraged me, I would be nervous and feeling like I'm doing something wrong."

THURSDAY, and it has to be Milan. But the first call is not to collect the details for her catwalk appearances, it is a press conference to publicise the work of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and World Vision. Despite her view of her escape from her homeland as her greatest achievement, she was persuaded to go back there by these charities last summer. The sight of the old people sitting naked on plastic sheets like babies, and of babies who lookso delicate you don't want to touch them in case they break, has profoundly shaped her own priorities.

"It's not because they are my people from Sudan, but because they are all people suffering," she said. "When I first started working with World Vision I would sit down and talk with them about issues that concern any part of the world. MSF told me about what was going on in North Korea. I also support Aids and breast cancer charities. I don't understand when people are being greedy or mean, when they say who should get what, when they get control of someone else's life."

Ms Wek's work for the US Committee for Refugees took her to the White House in September, where she spoke about Sudan and met Hillary Clinton.

"I would love to work on projects with her in the future." She also takes her message to the children of New York: "If somebody needs food to be able to stay alive, then that's what everybody should have," she tells them. "Everybody can put their hands together. There's a force that can come out of it."