My Hospital Intiative and being in Miss Earth Canada

Here is my Miss Earth specific blog http://nerdatmissearth.blogspot.com/ The official site for Miss Earth Canada is www.rosotro.com

Check out the Borama Fistula Hospital, Amoud University Medical School and the nursing programme at Borama General Hospital @ madbakh-women-international.org : why I am started this!!!
http://www.beautiesofcanada.com/2010/


Sunday, August 22, 2010

Photoshoot photo from Kyle Jackson from Lone Leaf

Maria Al-Masani
close up

Maria Al-Masani

I had an amazing photoshoot with Kyle Jackson from Lone Leaf. My mother said they were some of the best shots of me she has seen.

I am doing more photoshoots to expand my portfolio. He was great, amazing use of flash outdoors, light reflectors, great ideas, great shots. Definately a perfectionist. A very high level of professionalism and dedication to his craft. I am blessed and lucky to work with him.

Here is the best one, and another great one is coming up!

Pakistan Floods

My heart goes out to the people of Pakistan. Please donate if you haven't already. If you are in Canada, the government will match your funds.

Two thirds of the population are affected. Most savings and investment are not put in banks, but in property that now is under water and has washed away.

Naheed Mustafa

The real fallout from Pakistan's flood

Last Updated: Friday, August 20, 2010 | 5:15 PM ET Comments7Recommend14

The pictures arrive almost daily in my inbox, some professional, some quickly snapped on a cellphone.

They are almost all the same: hands reaching out for a meagre bag of wheat; a lone, scrawny child, wide-eyed and bewildered; water so deep that only the very tops of buildings are visible.

The flooding in Pakistan has been labeled with every kind of adjective — unprecedented, devastating, Biblical, epic, cruel. Some 20 million people — almost two-thirds the population of Canada — are directly affected.

The Indus River, usually a kilometre across at its widest, now measures up to almost 30 in some places. It has raged along a thousand kilometres, carving up the land, washing away homes and dragging away cattle and crops.

My relatives in Nowshera in Pakistan's northwest were flooded out of their home. They are unsure if they can salvage anything.

Like most people in Pakistan, their money isn't in a savings account, it was invested almost entirely in building their house. Lose the house, you lose everything.

It is difficult to overstate the enormity of the catastrophe here.

Pakistan is a nation of farmers but the agricultural sector has now been almost wiped out.

Harvest season was just around the corner when the rains came. So this season's crops are gone. And probably the next two as well. Sugar cane, cotton, wheat — all finished.

Some estimates put the cost of rejuvenating the agricultural sector at $15 billion. And that can come only after the tonnes of silt deposited by the floodwaters are removed.

Zardari doomed

One of the overarching themes in the news coverage in Pakistan and abroad is that the disaster was compounded by the incompetent response of the Zardari government.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, wearing a cap, talks with flood survivors in Jampur on Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010. He has been saying that Islamic terrorists may exploit the chaos and misery caused by the floods in Pakistan to gain new recruits, remarks echoed by U.S. Sen. John Kerry, who toured some of the worst hit areas alongside the president. (B. K. Bangash/Associated Press)  Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, wearing a cap, talks with flood survivors in Jampur on Thursday, Aug. 19, 2010. He has been saying that Islamic terrorists may exploit the chaos and misery caused by the floods in Pakistan to gain new recruits, remarks echoed by U.S. Sen. John Kerry, who toured some of the worst hit areas alongside the president. (B. K. Bangash/Associated Press)

As Pakistan drowned, President Asif Ali Zardari was touring France and the U.K. He was ostensibly on official business but the daily reports showed him casually dressed in jeans and a sport jacket — no tie — smiling and waving with his children in tow.

Through its actions over the years, the Pakistani government has cultivated an image for itself as corrupt and forever travelling with begging bowl in hand. And certainly that image is one of the reasons foreign aid has been slow to arrive.

So far, less than half of the pledged money has found its way into the country. But the fact is that while the optics of Zardari's overseas jaunt were bad, there was nothing the government could have done.

Plainly, this is a natural disaster of immense proportions and even the most focused official response could not have staved off the devastation.

The immediate aftermath will be handled in much the same way as the massive earthquake of 2005, with a mixture of local and international help from non-governmental organizations, formal international aid, and private citizens doing what they can, person to person.

Still, the anger against the government is increasing day by day. People are frustrated that they are still sleeping on the sides of roads surrounded by their children and belongings. Food and water are scarce; disease is spreading.

Mosharraf Zaidi is a Pakistani columnist who has worked for the development agencies of both the American and British governments. He says there's a growing feeling that the government will not survive the fallout.

"Zardari has become a lighting rod for the entire civilian structure. Whatever life this government had, this is the end. There is no recovery from this."

A challenge to democracy?

But the real issue here isn't just that Zardari — who never polled better than 20 per cent anyway — will be more reviled. It is that there is a real risk people will give up on the civilian system all together.

Pakistan's military is widely perceived to be a more efficient and less corrupt institution than civilian government.

And while no one is talking about a military coup at the moment, the growing disillusionment with the civilian leadership certainly throws into question Pakistan's experiment with democracy.

In the Western press, there has been much hand-wringing over the growing presence of the aid wings of certain militant organizations in the relief effort. But the phenomenon is not new.

These same organizations came out after the last big natural catastrophe, the 2005 earthquake, and delivered aid to people in some of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the country.

The Pakistani relationship with these groups is complex and it's simplistic to say that if people accept their help, they will also join their cause.

The greater fear at the moment is connected to Pakistan's long-term economic prospects.

Zaidi says the most recent projections predict Pakistan's economy could contract by up to 10 per cent as a result of the flood. That's a loss of about $17 billion in GDP, a reality, he says, "that is too depressing to contemplate."

There is no way international aid can make that up. Short-term relief is one thing, but over the next little while Pakistan is going to have to reconstruct itself.

Another crossroads

Given the track record of Pakistani governments, it feels naïve to think about best-case scenarios and self-motivated reconstruction.

When the earthquake ravaged Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 2005, governments and individuals opened their hearts and their wallets. The devastation in certain areas was so complete, it was hard to imagine those communities could ever come back to life.

When I went there five months later, towns and villages lay in ruins and families were living in UN-allotted tents. The schools were being run outdoors and people were waiting in long lines for housing reimbursements and rations.

Today, five years later, the town of Balakot is still waiting to be rebuilt and bodies are still being pulled from the rubble in Muzaffarabad at the earthquake's epicentre.

Every few months, it seems that some obscenely violent event in Pakistan heralds the declaration that the country is now at a crossroads of some great geo-political importance.

But those bombings and killings seem like mere blips on the radar in comparison to the deep and wide destruction this flood has wrought.

The Pakistani people are slowly emerging from their shock and the vastness of the task ahead is revealing itself.

An honest assessment is that it is unclear if the nation can gather itself up and move forward, or if its future prospects drowned with its crops.

One thing is certain, though: Without the continued and focused help of the international community, Pakistan and its people will not recover.



Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/08/20/f-vp-mustafa-pakistan-flood.html#ixzz0xLUrANXl

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Medic killed in Afghanistan

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10903737

Karen Woo holding a baby at The French Medical Institute for Children in Kabul


A foreign doctor is killed in Afghanistan. It happened to a friend of mine in Yemen who was very dedicated to the people of Yemen, Martha Meyers. She said her biggest fear was to leave Yemen, but in Yemen she was assassinated.

When two elephants fight, it is always the grass that suffers. This is NOT about religion, but it is about politics and power. As foreign military forces, from Alexander the Great, to the Persians to the British to the Russians, then Americans, have all spilled the blood of innocent Afghan civilians.

Some times it was spilled by accident, sometimes on purpose with the intention of instilling fear, sometimes out of anger. It shocked the civilian population, who later became desensitized enough that when a local group tried to seize power, using equally violent and outrageous means became perfectly acceptable. After all the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know. When it come to bad boys, our boy is our boy, and by definition better than theirs. This makes such crimes excusable, not altogether illegal.

Violence, whether it is domestic abuse, war crimes, treating adults like children, genocide or killing doctor is all the same. It is always about one and only one thing: control. It is usually perpetuated by those who desperately want control, but are lack security in some way, lack legitimacy, lack both resources and morals, have ego problems, and/or lack conditions vital to human existence such as housing, shelter, etc. I try to blame anyone, as blaming is unproductive and I have never seen blaming improve any situation. Rather I try to analyze root causes and try to develop a plan of eliminating the problem.

Corruption or backing it has to stop, accidental bombing of weddings has to stop first. Doctors have to be associated not with the problem: bombing, violence, corruption, torture, ...but with the solution, and should have the protection of native tribal leaders of the area.

It is so sad that some people are so focused on themselves and their own goals, that they become sociopathic killers, and kill hundreds. By killing that doctor, not only did they kill the doctors, but the patients who desperately need the treatment.

Miss Universe Evening Dress Photo


Here it is.

I am now taking modeling lessons at X Models Managment, took some portfolio shots. Those should come up shortly

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Fashion Design

  • I am now taking sewing/couture lessons at Darrell Thomas. My instructor is phenomenal, has a great understanding of couture. Meanwhile Darrell Thomas has an exquisite boutique collection of couture fabrics. It is like being in a candy-store. I linger around the fabric store near the class gawking at fabrics until they tell me, sorry, we are closing.

I am leaning fashion design to learn what it takes to make a garment. I hope that combined with micro-credit, sewing machines are the new women's liberation for in developing countries. An example would be in Somalia, at the Borama National Fistula Hospital's micro-credit program. I am trying my best to understand this very practical skill, and teach it to others. I wrote my thesis on micro-finance. We give micro-credit for women to learn a skill and start a business that can be marketable internationally... but what skill besides finance could I teach them. A skill that is practical and needed everywhere. Answer: Sewing!