THE MOMENT I GOT BACK to New York in May, I realized something had fundamentally changed inside me. I went back to my apartment and my roommate, JAn, then tried hitting the nightclub scene with a bevy of beautiful models in tow, but none of it was exciting anymore. I would catch myself sitting alone, quiet, deep in thought. Sudan, my mother, and my family took up more room inside my mind, and JAn couldn’t figure out who I had become either.

JAN: What is going on with you, Ger? You’re not yourself.

ME: I think the opposite is true. I wasn’t myself before. No one who does what we do is.

I started focusing more on fitness and got a job as a personal trainer at New York Sports Clubs. I reported for work at four a.m. every day and left for home at five p.m., and in the evenings, I went to acting and modeling castings. This strict routine became my new life.

I started saving the money I earned, hoping to fund a documentary about my life in Sudan and America. I soon shared the idea with a number of my Hollywood contacts. Meanwhile, I revisited my earlier plan of going to Milan, Italy, and staying for a few months to model.

Arrangements were made with an agency in Milan to act as my local host there. No sooner had I put foot to pavement that June than I was surrounded by hundreds of models, makeup artists, and other human cogs in the fashion industry, all chasing designers, casting directors, and agency representatives, hunting for gigs.

Each evening in Milan, we gathered to drink cheap wine, talk, and dance. I became friends with an African American model named Ibrahim Baaith, who had a Black Panthers background and always got deep, trying to focus the conversation on the need for more consciousness in the world: mainly about slavery, the ills of capitalism, and the oppression of black people across the world.

Ibrahim liked asking me about Africa and Sudan, wanting me to take more of an interest in what was happening there. We were usually the only blacks present at these nightly outings, and Ibrahim always focused his attention on my journey from Africa, emphasizing how far I had traveled as a refugee to be part of the fashion industry. Our conversations lit a spark inside me and gave me a sense of direction in my search for a meaningful life.

Ibrahim returned to New York about a week later, and in his absence, I cut down on the late-night, cheap-wine-drinking routine and spent more time working out in public parks, where I would see black people, mostly immigrants, with nowhere to stay. Sometimes during my public workouts, small crowds would gather around to watch me. That’s how I started speaking and opening up to the black people.

I saw firsthand the hard lives lived by these African refugees in Italy, many of whom were homeless and shared stories of how they endured terrible racism on the Italian streets. Here, it was out in the open and on the surface, whereas in America, the racism is baked into the earth, woven into its fabric to the point where you can overlook it if you don’t know how to spot the threads. These people, who looked so similar to me, squatted in the streets, sleeping on cardboard. While my fellow models whisked past such scenes, minding their business on the way to the next party or runway show, I couldn’t help but think about my late brother Chuol, who’d possibly suffered the same fate in Addis Ababa before dying a miserable, lonely death. There was a thin line separating me from these less fortunate refugees, a fact that made me detest the self-centered life I had thrived in for most of my twenties. It had to come to an end. I also felt a burning desire to lift up other refugees, the way my aunt and uncle had done for me.

The combination of the suffering I saw in Milan and my cousin Nok constantly mentioning our homeland inspired me to want to turn my life’s focus toward activism, for the benefit of those who had traveled journeys like mine but maybe gone off the rails. At that point—at an incredible career high—I realized how lucky I had been. I understood on a deep level that even as the refugee resettlement program had saved the lives of innumerable people like myself, we still suffered crippling emotional damage as a result of being cut off from our pasts and cultures. I had always felt an incredible sense of kinship whenever I spent time with other refugees—a feeling of affiliation—and I wanted to preserve and share that with the entire African diaspora, emotionally removed from its roots.

I reached out to my southern Sudanese friend Ajou Deng, from our Lost Boys team in Connecticut, who now lived in London, and asked him whether I could stop over on my way to New York. I bought a one-way ticket to London.

I landed at Gatwick Airport and received the shock of my life. Immigration officials pulled me aside, as if I were a criminal, and started interrogating me and checking my luggage.

IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL: What’s your name?

ME: Ger Duany.

IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL: Where are you from?

ME: I’m originally from Sudan.

IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL: Why are you traveling around Europe…and carrying an American passport?

ME: I am an American citizen of Sudanese origin. I am a model. I’m coming from doing modeling gigs in Milan.

IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL: Why are you in London?

ME: I’m here to visit my friend Ajou.

IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL: We don’t believe anything you say. You must return to Milan on the next flight out of London.

I couldn’t believe it.

Back in Milan, airport authorities picked me off the plane as if I were some high-profile international criminal. I explained to them what I had been doing in Milan before flying out to London, and gave them the address of where I had been staying. They let me go. I went back to the apartment the agency had rented for me, but it was already late at night. The landlord couldn’t hear me knock. That night I slept outside on the streets, at a bus stop.

The following morning, I returned to the apartment.

LANDLORD: Ger, I thought you had left for London?

I spared him the details of my trip.

I flew back to New York at the end of July. I became a complete recluse, more than I already had been. I pulled away from fashion and modeling for a bit and focused on what was happening back in Sudan. I started using any platform to write and share my thoughts, and people who knew me began to notice my transformation—and to pay attention.

JAn remarked on the intensity of my conversations and how my outlook had completely changed. I used to clown around a lot—a social butterfly—but now, he and others said, I moved with a purpose. I have no idea how they picked up on so much just through my body language. People who weren’t familiar with me or my work also started getting drawn to the things I was talking about and working on. I realized there was traction and interest in what I was doing.

For the next two years, I worked as a high-end personal trainer in New York while living in an apartment my cousin Kueth had left me in Harlem. I continued to turn down modeling jobs and plugged myself into the network of Sudanese activists across the world. I was becoming someone else in the eyes of those who knew me, and there was no turning back.

Over the previous ten years, Paul and my aunt and uncle had been back to Sudan several times. Each time any of them made the trip, it felt to me like they were going all the way to the moon. After my disastrous flight to London, and with the difficulty I had experienced just making ends meet, the thought of flying to Sudan again filled me with a lot of fear. But now it dawned on me that as an American citizen, I had the right to come and go from America as I pleased. I could return to Sudan without risking being caught up in the dead end of war and starvation. I had citizenship, which I’d taken my time applying for—I waited almost a decade—because although I had one foot in the United States, the other was still firmly rooted in Sudan. I also now had money, which allowed me to do something as simple as visit my father. I resolved to do just that as soon as I could.

My trip to Milan had given me a different perspective. My new brother, Ibrahim, who told me I had opened his eyes to Africa, had awakened something new, something important inside me. I wanted to create a life with meaning.