I didn't know anybody there, and I used to call my mother every day." Kebede refused to abandon the idea of modeling as a career, however, and instead moved to Chicago in 1999, where three of her four brothers were living at the time. I was a little girl, and it was depressing. She lasted just three months, telling London Sunday Times journalist Sarah Baxter that "it was too tough for me. Kebede followed the standard career path for a model and moved to Paris while still in her teens. Interviewed for Essence magazine by the world's first famous model from Africa, the Somali-born Iman, Kebede joked that as a teenager, "I was the skinny girl and people were saying, 'My God, feed her. Her modeling career started in Addis Ababa, where she stood out from the crowd because the standard of beauty there was not tall and thin, as in the Western world. Her father was an airline executive there, and she was the only daughter in a family that also included her four brothers. Kebede was born on January 3, 1978, in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The first thing I do when I go back to visit, as soon as I get off the plane, is take a whiff of the air. "I miss the simplicity of life, the fun," she admitted in a 2004 interview that appeared in Essence. Ethiopian-born model Liya Kebede lives in a palatial apartment on New York's Upper East Side, but the first black model to represent the Estee Lauder global cosmetics brand still yearns for her life back in the Horn of Africa.
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