Saving Safa: Rescuing A Little Girl from FGM

Name: Saving Safa: Rescuing A Little Girl from FGM
Availability: OutOfStock
Author: Waris Dirie
ISBN: 9780349005980

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 records 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. 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.

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. Just 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.