Diandra Forrest was nine years old when she realized she was different.
She grew up in a family of five siblings, and only she and her younger brother had albinism. Friends in the neighborhood would ask her older brother if she was adopted. At school, and even on the train with her mother, adults would stare at them and laugh. She didn’t understand why.
The years gave her confidence. Today, she is a model and actress, the first with albinism to be signed by a major agency, and she has walked international runways. Even so, she says people like her are seen as beings from another planet, and that this shouldn’t become a freak show.
What she wants most is something else: to create a big brother or big sister program for children with albinism and help their parents understand how the condition affects them. As a child, she says, she would have loved to have someone older like her nearby, so she could see what she might be like when she grew up.
