From grass hut to supermodel  to UN Special Ambassador for women's rights in Africa - the amazing life of Waris Dirie

By Vida Adamoli 

Waris Dirie is an ex-supermodel and Bond girl. Revlon, who once used her as the face of their skin care products, called her the most beautiful woman in the world. 

But Waris is more than a fashion icon, an envied celebrity with perfect skin, sculpted cheekbones and elongated limbs. A survivor of  appalling circumstances, she now fights fearlessly against the terrible practice of Female Genital Mutilation, also called Female Circumcision.

Giving laptops to children who live without electricity, the telephone or even running water seems crazy - but it's producing startling results

A clutch of children are darting around a dusty village in one of the poorest and most remote areas of Cambodia. They are measuring arms, legs, noses, each other - anything! Older kids are leaning over a computer in the dry heat, trying to understand how gears work. Later, they are going to use the measurements and their new knowledge of gears to animate robots.   A small child shows another how to press a computer key to produce musical sounds.

Humans are not a natural prey of sharks. You are more likely to be struck by lightning or killed in a car accident on the way to the beach than by a shark attack.

More people are killed by dogs every year than have been killed by sharks in the last century. Of the sixty shark attacks a year worldwide, only three people each year are attacked in Hawaiian waters.  Teen surfer, Bethany Hamilton, was one of them.

writes Geraldine Royds

With the help of her friends, Hamilton made her way to the beach, where she was rushed to the local hospital. She had lost 60% of her blood. If the bite had been 2 inches further in, the attack would have been fatal.

Despite the trauma of the encounter, Bethany Hamilton was determined to fulfill her dream of becoming a professional surfer.  Three weeks after the attack, she was back in the water.

Read More

Danza Voluminosa is like any other professional dance troupe, only heavier – a lot heavier, writes Geraldine Royds

With most members weighing over 200 pounds, the founder, Juan Miguel Mas, says he created the group to make a political as well as an artistic statement. ‘We obese people also need to express ourselves with our bodies,’ he says. ‘We feel our bodies, we command them and we enjoy them just like any other human being.’  The troupe has overcome ridicule to win applause for their exuberant performances, selling-out shows in Havana’s top theatres.

It was a few months after the planes crashed into the Twin Towers that Suleiman Bakhit, a young Jordanian studying in Minneapolis, was set upon by four white youths who cut him up with broken glass.

This terrifying experience left him very angry. It also motivated him to start outreach work teaching  American schoolchildren that Arabs are people and not monsters.

Amnat Ruanroeng, born in 1978 or 1979 (he isn't sure), is a second grade drop-out and former drug addict. He was also part of the fearsome Thai Olympic boxing squad at the Beijing Olympics.  This rise to glory started with a fifteen-year prison sentence for robbery. 

It was his third stint in jail and the judge wasn't feeling at all merciful. To Amnat Ruenroeng the prospect of fifteen years banged up was an eternity. His motive for  signing up for the prison boxing program was to help pass the time. Little did he imagine that it would turn into his salvation.

In 2007, just a year after he first stepped into the prison ring, he won a bronze medal in the light-flyweight division. And the day after his victory, he was released from jail on good behavior.  'I can't believe that I'm on the Olympic team,' he says grinning with joy. 'I should still be in jail.'

Read more about the nationwide prison boxing programme offering Thailand's male and female inmates a way out of crime.