The Makur Chuot family from South Sudan are an extraordinary success story when it comes to refugees making their way in a new country. The West Australian recently ran a feature article  where Akech and Mangar talked about their extraordinary sporting and community achievements. Mangar will head to the Rio Olympics in June as a champion sprinter and Akech is the first African woman to play for Western Australia’s State AFL team.

Both pay tribute to their mother who has guided and helped them through some of the darkest times in their life to a brighter future in Australia.

“The pain of unnecessary death is wielding great power in the young lives of people such as Akech Makur Chuot.

The 23-year-old’s father, a chief in the South Sudanese village of Pagarau, was killed by rebels in a hail of machinegun bullets barely a month after she was conceived. He died unaware his daughter was on her way.

Her mother managed to take her daughter and seven siblings across the border to a Kenyan refugee camp and eventually to their new life in WA. While her father’s leadership genes inspired a desire to make a difference, it was the rawness of a recent murder in Makur Chuot’s new hometown which accelerated that quest.

When her 17-year-old friend Kuol Akut was allegedly murdered during a brawl at a Girrawheen party in February, it was a violent incident like so many others blighting the lives of young African immigrants who should have been on their way to a more promising future.

But Makur Chuot and a pack of her Perth peers are compiling compelling resumes through sport and acts of social conscience, anxious to role model positive ways of life.”

You can read the full article here.

Akech with her Mother and brother Mangar