Her faith in a loving caring God is so refreshing and encouraging - I hope that one day soon we will hear of the end of FGM. Landing a job as a house servant in London, Dirie struggled to launch a modeling career while dodging British immigration authorities and the dreadful results of marriages of convenience. From the deserts of Somalia to the world of high fashion, she battles against oppression and emerges a real champion. A young woman tries to escape all this and after many adventures he succeeds and achieves international recognition in the modelling world, thus gaining independence and respect.

Through projects like “Save a little desert flower”, which seeks to protect little girls in Africa from FGM. But the book is remarkable less for its deliberately dramatic set pieces, and more for its haunting evocation of the little-told life of Somalian nomads, seen from a child's telling perspective, where life centres on the beloved camels, the horrors of womanhood are still an exciting mystery, and the nights are filled with the smell of frankincense.Dirie's beauty led her to a career as a fashion model; her experience as a young girl subjected to circumcision led her to speak out against the practice and eventually become a human rights ambassador to the United Nations. With her story Waris Dirie brings awareness to the terrible tradition of female genital mutilation in Africa. A procedure that kills thousands of children and leaves women with a life of pain and complications due to their clitorus and labia being removed and sewn up so they are clean and ready for marriage often leaving a hole the size of a matchstick for peeing out of. There is the dealing with a rapist, the set up marriages for legal status and how she coped with the very private matter of her FMG. Despite the fact that Waris talks about horrific things, this is one of the most uplifting books I have read because it really is a story of survival of an amazing woman.

What I also love about Desert Flower is that it deals with FGM without having the issue consume the entire book. She’s an accomplished public speaker who has performed at numerous venues, including Cinequest, LitQuake, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the Women, Peace and Conflict Lecture and Film Series, and the American Women’s Association of Rome. She traveled alone across the dangerous Somali desert to Mogadishu--the first leg of a remarkable journey that would take her to London, where she worked as a house servant; then to nearly every corner of the globe as an internationally renowned fashion model; and ultimately to New York City, where she became a human rights ambassador for the U. She moved from London to New York and became one of the first African Supermodels receiving an exclusive agreement with the cosmetic group Revlon. Joining the current rage for model memoirs is Dirie, a native of Somalia, who has for more than a decade stalked the world's catwalks and appeared in numerous glossy magazines.Parts of it are humorous, parts of it make you gasp aloud with shock, and all the way through the novel, you have the upmost respect and admiration for such a strong, grounded and courageous woman. In the movie we also see other prominent actors, such as Sally Hawkins (“Happy Go Lucky”, “Cassandra's Dream”), Timothy Spall (“Harry Potter”, “Vanilla Sky”), Meera Syal (“Scoop”, “Anita and Me”), Juliette Stevenson (“Bend It Like Beckham”) and Craig Parkinson (“Control”).

After fleeing her family, Dirie worked as a housemaid for a well-placed uncle in London, where she was discovered as a model and embarked on a successful career in fashion. In 2010, the Foundation was re-named “Desert Flower Foundation” to reflect the broader approach to addressing Female Genital Mutilation though economic projects in Africa. The foundation’s team is made ​​up of men and women committed to gender equality, human rights and all of them share Waris Dirie’s ideal: Ending Female Genital Mutilation. Tenses are inconsistent, vocabulary is childish and vulgar, and some information is disorganized, inaccurate and/or missing!Penniless and speaking little English, she became a janitor in Mc Donalds where she was famously discovered by a fashion photographer.

What I didn't know before reading this book is that the practice of FGM is actually increasing not decreasing as immigrant are taking this terrible custom with them into the western world. By age five, however, she had been introduced to FGM, the practice that would ensure her marriageability (and thus her marketability) in Somali culture. Plus I felt that some of her musings sadly lived up to negative stereotypes of models and modeling as superficial and vain. It seems to me that when people say that they don't want to interfere with somebody's religious liberties, they mean that they don't care enough to do something about the victims of specific 'religious liberties'. Waris Dirie escaped from her native Galkayo, Somalia, fleeing to Mogadishu to escape an arranged marriage.

Then, aged 12, when her father attempted to arrange a marriage with a 60 year old stranger in exchange for five camels - she took flight. She has interviewed diplomats and heads of state on five continents, patients in an Addis Ababa hospital, rape camp survivors in Kosovo, and midwives in the mountains of East Timor. Cathy is also the author of a memoir about her life in rural Pennsylvania, The Birdhouse Chronicles, a book first written as her master’s thesis while she attended Penn State’s MFA program in creative writing. The BBC commissioned the programme “A Nomad in New York”, based on Waris Dirie for their series “The day that changed my life”. I especially like the fact that she is doing this without rejecting her culture, for which is proud, something that is very important as many people use this struggle to pass their racist messages.