Saving Safa: Rescuing a Little Girl from FGM

Description

Waris Dirie, the Somalia nomad who became a supermodel, and an anti-FGM activist, first came to the world's attention with the publication of her autobiography, Desert Flower. The book was subsequently made into a film and little Safa Nour, from one of the slums of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, was chosen to play the young Waris. The book and the film record many extraordinary things - from facing down a tiger, to being discovered by a famous photographer in London - but it also tells the grim story of female circumcision, an ordeal that the young Waris had to endure. SAVING SAFA opens with a letter from Safa, now aged seven, who explains that she is worried that she will undergo FGM in spite of the contract her parents have signed with Dirie's Desert Flower Foundation stating that they will never have their daughter cut. Waris drops everything and flies to Djibouti where she meets Safa's father and mother who thinks her daughter should be cut to stop the community ostracising them. As Safa was saved from FGM through a contract with her parents, the Foundation believes a thousand other girls can be saved through providing their families with aid in return for a promise not to mutilate their daughters

Waris Dirie is an internationally renowned model and was the face of Revlon skin-care products. In 1997 she was appointed by the UN as special ambassador against FGM. She lives in Vienna with her son.

It is Safa, with her wide-eyed excitement at the world, who brings this well-written book alive . . . What Saving Safa does so successfully is humanise the tragedy of FGM - Evening Standard Dirie's writing is fluid and honest; we can sense her commitment and that of her foundation, Desert Flower, to protecting Safa - Guardian