Waris Dirie
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Waris Dirie (born 1965 in Somalia) is a fashion model and a UN advocate for the abolition of female genital mutilation.
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[edit] Early life
Dirie was born into a nomadic tribe in Somalia. Her home was a portable hut woven from grass. According to her autobiography, at age five, her mother held her down while a local woman cut away her genitals. Afterwards, she was stitched up tightly, leaving a hole the diameter of a matchstick. "I felt not complete with myself as a woman. Some days I felt so powerless," she said. "When I think back about that, it still disturbs me. But coming back over that is still the hardest thing for me because you have to learn about yourself, you have to feel comfortable with yourself." Although Dirie survived the razor, her sister and two cousins did not.
[edit] Modelling career
Dirie escaped from Somalia at the age of twelve, running away from the prospect of her father giving her in marriage to a 60-year-old man in exchange for five camels. She fled to the Somali capital, Mogadishu, before a well-connected uncle provided an escape route to London. She ended up working for a relative there, staying in Britain illegally and surviving by scrubbing floors in McDonalds.
By chance, she was discovered by a photographer who put her face on the cover of the Pirelli calendar. From there, her career took off. "It's very sad that I had to make the choice to leave my country and at the same time I did not want to leave," she said. "Africa is different. I was young. I had nothing to worry about. I had my family, I had my animals, I had my simple life. It was beautiful." Dirie now lives in New York but still feels the contrasts between the West and her war-torn home. "Here it seems like it is chaos forever and I'm trying to sit down for a moment and there's no time for that," she laughed. "In Somalia we don't have a time so we don't care what time it is. But in the West, everything is money-money, power, sucking, sucking away. It is never enough."
In 1987, Waris played a role in the Bond movie The Living Daylights. A decade later she quit modelling to focus on her work for the UN campaign against female genital mutilation.
Waris is a cousin of fellow Somali supermodel Iman.[1]
[edit] Attack
Waris Dirie was attacked in March 2004 in her home in Vienna. Then aged 40, she had moved from her flat in Cardiff to escape the persecution of a 26-year-old Portuguese man who had become convinced that she loved him.
Paulo Augusto was in custody after apparently following her 1,000 miles across Europe and gaining access to her apartment by climbing through a neighbour's window. "She was so frightened and in shock that she let him in," a police spokesman, Harald Hofmayer, said. Waris Dirie suffered minor injuries when her assailant threw her to the floor, he added. The attacker left in a taxi, only to return later on foot and smash one of the building's ground-floor windows. He was arrested when neighbours called the police.
The suspect had met Waris Dirie six months earlier when his brother was working at her previous residence in Wales, police said. He later broke into that home and stole items of her clothing. [2]
[edit] Bibliography
She has written three autobiographical novels:
