2010 has been a very busy and exciting year for me and my team. In this post, I will give you a little summary of my personal highlights in 2010, as well as an outlook on the year ahead of us.
2010 started with a real highlight when Desert Flower was awarded the Bavarian movie award as “Best Film” in January 2010 in Munich / Germany. During my speech on stage I said that one of my main goals would be to bring this movie to Africa, a goal that I continued to work on throughout 2010.
In February I travelled to Berlin to present the new campaign of the Desert Flower Foundation and the German agency Heymann Brand de Gelmini, as well as several other NGOs. The campaign entitles “Stop FGM Now” consists of a TV spot and newspaper ads and is very successful. Thanks to the many supporters on platforms such as Facebook, the campaign received the German Social Media Price.
In March, Desert Flower celebrates its premiere in several European countries. I travelled to Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam to attend the French, Spanish and Benelux premiere of the movie.
The visit to Paris was especially important to me: together with the PPR foundation, the Desert Flower Foundation organised a charity premiere that raised money for a French NGO engaged in the fight against FGM.
The movie has been successfully released in 27 countries so far, from Brazil to South Korea, from Greece to Japan, and will be released in several other countries, including the US and Canada in 2011.
In April, I travelled to Ethiopia with my team to visit a number of projects. I was especially impressed by a project initiated by the German entrepreneur Felix Ahlers, who supports coffee producers in Ethiopia in bringing coffee processing (roasting and packaging) to Ethiopia. Shortly after meeting him in Addis Ababa, he wrote a guest post on his project for my blog.
After I had spend some time in Ethiopia to finally see my mother and siblings again, another event that was very important for me personally took place in June 2010 : Desert Flower celebrated its Africa premiere at the Addis Film Festival in Ethiopia. I was very happy that the movie was finally being shown in Africa, and especially proud that I could bring my family to the premiere, as you can see here.
The Africa premiere was followed by another very important event of the last year: in July, the African Union appointed me as Special Ambassador for Peace and Security in Africa. It is a great honour for me to be an ambassador for peace in my continent. You can read my official statement on my role as a peace ambassador here.
In October I was invited to the yearly Pio Manzu Conference in Rimini, Italy, where I received the Gold Medal of the Republic of Italy for my achievements as a human rights activist. I met many very interesting people in Rimini, such as Jean-Claude Trichet and Shirin Ebadi.
I am also very proud to have been voted one of the 500 most influential Muslims in 2010, as well as one of the 30 most inspiring women in 2010 chosen by Forbes magazine.
In November, I travelled to New York for a photo shoot with Liya Kebede, who plays me in the movie Desert Flower. You can see some pictures of the campaign here.
I also have beautiful memories of my trip to Bratislava in November, where I met many people who support my work and inspire me to continue my fight.
In December, we worked intensively on preparing for the many interesting projects that lie ahead of us in 2011. As you may have noticed, we also changed the name of my organisation from Waris Dirie Foundation to Desert Flower Foundation. You can read an explanation on my decision to make this change here.
As you can see, many things happened in 2010, many interesting projects found their starts and I cannot wait to out them into practice in 2011 with the great support of all of you!
LOVE,
Waris
