Hoop dreams come true for south sudanese wheelchair player

"I was like, 'Wow, I can actually do this!' " Malat Lueth Wei says, remembering his first time trying wheelchair basketball. That was over 10 years ago. Since then, the

sport has taken him all over the world. Wei has shot hoops at basketball arenas across the U.S., where he is one of the country's best players, and in France, where he played

professionally. This summer, he came to Washington, D.C., to speak at a screening of _No Limits_, a short documentary that featured him. And in 2018, he returned to his homeland of South

Sudan, where he helped introduce the game to its disabled population. Wei was born in what is now South Sudan and diagnosed with polio at age 3. His father went missing during the civil wars

leading to the country's eventual independence in 2011. During those volatile times, their family ended up at a refugee camp in Ethiopia, where Wei remembers crawling around on his

arms on dirt roads before getting a wheelchair. When he was 12, his family moved to Houston. He had a tough time adjusting in the United States. It was quite late in his childhood to make

such a huge move, and he was enrolled in sixth grade despite knowing very little English. Some kids made fun of him, but a more accepting group introduced him to the sport that would change

the trajectory of his life. "I used to go to the park with the with the community kids, with all the children in the neighborhood ... to go play basketball with them," Wei says. He

was the only one shooting from a wheelchair. "The fact that they actually treated me as equal and not somebody less, you know, that's where everything started." Eventually, a

friend began looking into local wheelchair basketball facilities. Wei got in, trained hard and started traveling with a local team to competitions, and things took off from there. Wei, 25,

loves being in the gym, flying across the court in a specialized wheelchair designed to move fast and turn easily. The games are incredibly intense, with screeching tires, crashing metal and

the impressive coordination and grit of the athletes on display. As someone who loved sports so much that he played soccer with his hands at the refugee camp, Wei treasures this opportunity

to compete. "It means the world to me just to share my message with the world, of what I have accomplished in life, from where I came from, with nothing, not knowing how to read or

write English," Wei says. His return to South Sudan was inspired by the work of another wheelchair basketball star — Jess Markt, who leads international wheelchair basketball programs

for the International Committee of the Red Cross. Markt was a Division 1 track athlete at the University of Oregon before he was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident over 20

years ago. He completed physical rehab, earned his degree and started working in communications but felt something was missing. Before his injury, basketball was his favorite sport. It would

be a few years before he gave the wheelchair version a shot. "I heard about it," Markt says, "but I didn't know much, and I just kind of thought, 'Is that really

going to be as much fun as the basketball I grew up with?' " It turned out to be just as much fun — and far more meaningful than he could have imagined. "I've always

talked about it as kind of the culmination of my rehabilitation process," Markt says. After nine years playing in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, he heard that a team in

Afghanistan was reaching out to U.S.-based leagues looking for a coach. Markt answered the call, leaving his office job in 2009 to be the volunteer coach of a wheelchair basketball team

thousands of miles away. In 2012, the ICRC hired him to run wheelchair basketball camps in areas where either violence or lack of proper medical care means that a disproportionate number of

people are living with a disability. "War has has utterly crippled the medical system," Markt says of the conditions in South Sudan and other conflict-stricken countries he has

worked in. "So really, almost everyone that we work with is, in some way, either a direct or tangential result of conflict." "I think the initial powerful benefit of doing

this is really getting people out of their homes, out of the situation of being truly marginalized," he adds. "What I have learned from adaptive sports is that it allows

individuals to test their boundaries in ways that a lot of the world or society or community doesn't allow us to explore," says Mia Ives-Rublee, who consults businesses and

nonprofits on disability issues and was herself a wheelchair athlete. She attended the State Department screening of the film about Wei and Markt. Markt went to Juba, South Sudan, to run a

camp in 2017, which caught the attention of Wei. He reached out to Markt, hoping to be involved. "I saw him on a video," Wei said. "I'm like, 'Wow, this is this is

actually cool ... and there's already somebody that is doing it in my country?' " He said he thought, "If I can connect with him, we can make a difference. We can change

people's lives by playing wheelchair basketball." One year later, the two were on a plane together as Wei returned to South Sudan for the first time since he was a kid. His ability

to speak local languages was invaluable, says Markt. And the two of them set up games where groups from opposite sides of the civil conflict played together on the court — in their

wheelchairs. "It was amazing to have these groups playing alongside one another when such interaction is so rare these days," Markt says. Back in his American home, Wei is

attending community college and hopes to play on the University of Arizona's varsity wheelchair basketball team while completing his bachelor's degree — the school is a leader in

adaptive sports. After that, he plans on championing human rights and social stability in South Sudan, where he hopes to start a business and continue to work to help its people. "I

want peace in South Sudan," he says, "for everybody to come together as one and treat each other equally, and build a nation." Reflecting on his visit to his homeland, he

recalls, "They see me as somebody who went through what they went through," Wei says. "Now that they have discovered something new, something that they can achieve. It was not

just playing basketball all the time. It gave them confidence, to go out and reach for other things." And that's what wheelchair basketball has done for him, he adds: "It

just took off and took me to places I thought I was definitely not going to." ------------------------- _Aman Kidwai (_ @AmanfromCT _) is a freelance journalist based in Washington,

D.C., who covers sports, business and community news for media outlets like_Washington City Paper _and_SB Nation _._ Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.