NB: Despite the click bait headline it's an interesting article on succeeding as an entrepreneur in difficult circumstances.

Edit: Post title has been updated (thankfully), I originally had the article title.

She is awesome. I thought from the title the story would end badly for her, but it ended awesomely.

Yeah. Is it correct to say that the only reason she could prove her innocence from the rape charge though is that she at that point revealed she was a women?

Or as any struggling, but strong human being.

Agreed, though it's also worth noting the article does a poor job of conveying an accurate sense of time. As you read it you assume it's a recent story, and then suddenly the year 2001 is mentioned but nothing more. So unless you click through to the podcast, you can't get a good sense of when it happened and how long for.

Recent is relative. I've had the same initial response to learning that a story is 10 or 20 years old (or more). But I think that reflects more our presumptions, cultural context, and age, than it does a deficiency in reporting. Unless Tanzania has experienced a significant and pertinent cultural shift since then, the year 2001 could be just as recent as yesterday as far as it concerns subject matter context.

Also, it's not like the year is buried 10 pages in. It's midway through a relatively short article. It's just as likely the writer put the year in the middle of the story out of artist license than as a way to obscure the timeline.

Agreed. It's an amazing story.

Women disguising themselves as men to do "men's work" is probably as old as time. Here's documentation of women doing so to fight in the US Civil War:

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1993/spring/w...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-women-who-fought-i...

I had no idea miners could actually hit the jackpot like she did and find enough gems to become rich with.