Guor Maker is an American, Olympian and an Airman 1st Class. He has also been enslaved twice.

Maker was born in South Sudan at the height of the Sudanese Civil War. As a child, he was captured and enslaved, twice. He was one of 20,000 children displaced by the war. Maker tells the Air Force, “When I was captured, I was forced to be a slave laborer. I would wash dishes or do anything else needed to get by. I slept in a small cell and rarely got to eat…but not always.”

Maker escaped from enslavement but sustained serious injuries after solders beat him unconscious upon his escape. With a broken jaw, Maker eventually fled to Egypt, where he waited two years for a “miracle,” before finally being granted permission to enter the United States.

“Looking back at everything my family and I endured, it is a miracle that we made it out of there,” Maker says.

Maker lost 28 family members in the carnage of the Sudanese civil war.