A Beautiful Pregnant

Ari Davidson shared this post on her Instagram account and it inspired me and i'd like to share it with you guys :) Enjoy xxxx

Pregnancy is not glamorous. What I mean by that statement is not to be negative, but to really be honest, pregnancy is a full sacrifice. Your emotions, your body, your eating habits, your sleep cycle..that ALL changes.

Stretching pains, an active kicking baby throughout the night, and tension in my back is mainly what I feel most of the time. All an easy distraction from the main purpose, which is this little life inside of me. Last night I prayed out, almost in tears, because my tummy was so tight and my ligaments are stretching more for this baby to have more room to grow. I asked that He would fill me with His peace and wisdom. I told Him I wasn't able to move forward without Him in every single step.

Every time I am in my small amount of pain, I think of Jesus and His sacrifice. I have never felt closer to Him. This pregnancy has taught me so much already about becoming more selfless and has given me more of an awareness of the unknown. This gift of life does not cause this process to be glamorous, but it prepares me to reach past my limits and rely on Jesus' strength and sacrifice. All I know is that Jesus is very much alive and very much in love with us.

  

My Facebook Friend Ieva Blaževičiūtė Is A Professional Photographer

Since about two months I've added an inspiried friend on my Facebook. He is a professional photographer and this latest work:

PLEASE, DON'T FORGET TO VISIT IEVA'S SITE http://www.ieva-photography.com/

What Is Wrong With Our Culture ( Alan Watts )

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make community structures work. I’ve been reflecting and meditating on the many possibilities we could create, trying pull together the common limitations and complaints people generally have about our world and how it currently functions, and then find a common thread. What drives us? What do we really want? How much of our displeasure is actually a result of our own thoughts and limitations vs just our external world?

What about people who convince themselves that they don’t need to grow, yet aren’t in the greatest of places within themselves? How do we go about living as a group, community, humanity, etc., when we have all these different ideals? What exactly drives our world to be the way it is? Is it the fact that it is, what appears to be, ‘poorly designed?’ Is it our consciousness and view of the world that makes it this way, and therefore we keep repeating it, since we are still searching for answers?

The State of Our World

Alan Watts draws attention to the state of our world and what we hope to get out of it in a powerful way. He touches on our thoughts as they relate to the world, and looks at how those thoughts drive our creation of it.

In my view, we need a drastic shift in our consciousness and thoughts towards ourselves and our world. We can recognize and see the ‘problems’ around us, but recognizing the solution to them is often a challenge. Is it entirely physical? Do we need to change our minds and perceptions of things? With so many brilliant ideas out there that seem to continue to get suppressed and limited, one has to wonder whether or not the world simply isn’t ready for such a shift yet. By this I mean, maybe as a whole there aren’t enough of us who are ready for such drastic changes – maybe, unconsciously we are holding those changes back. There is no doubt that there is a power structure out there that is also suppressing things, but what is allowing and supporting that power structure to be that way in the first place? Is it perhaps us?

Certainly something to think about.

A Conversation With Bill Gates

"An epidemic is one of the few catastrophes that could set the world back drastically in the next few decades," Bill Gates warns in an essay he wrote for the March 18 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

In the article, titled "The Next Epidemic — Lessons From Ebola," he says the Ebola epidemic is a "wake-up call."

"Because there was so little preparation, the world lost time ... trying to answer basic questions about containing Ebola," writes Gates (whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a supporter of NPR).

That's why, he continues, "the world needs a global warning and response system for outbreaks." And part of that system must be a better way to get supplies and "trained personnel" to the scene, where they can work with local efforts

Few people would argue with that goal. But there's a lot of debate around how to execute his proposal.

For example, some global health gurus aren't so sure we need to create a response system. Maybe we already have one.

Look at the response to the 2013 typhoon in the Philippines, says Dr. Bruce Aylward, assistant director general for emergencies at the World Health Organization. "Within two weeks, we had 151 foreign medical teams on the ground."

The response wasn't so fast when Ebola struck West Africa. Actually, many agencies agree with Gates that it was way too slow. And the question is why.

It wasn't that there weren't enough volunteers, Aylward says. Rather, the volunteers needed to know what would happen if they were to contract Ebola. And there weren't reassuring answers early in the epidemic.

"There was no way anyone could guarantee the right of medical evacuation for people affected by Ebola," he says. So for any future force of emergency health workers, it's critical to offer what Aylward calls "duty of care" — the ability to ensure the needs of aid workers can be met if anything were to happen, in terms of their health, security or safety.

Then there are questions about whether flying in outsiders is the best solution.

"I'm going to speak frankly," says Emmanuel d'Harcourt, senior health director of the International Rescue Committee. "While there's probably some value in the margin [of a global response system], it's not the heart of the issue, and it has the potential to distract us from the real issues."

Which are?

"Local preparedness and local response," d'Harcourt says. "We know that in most disasters, not just epidemics, but all kinds of disasters, the people who are able to respond the earliest are local. If you have local preparedness, you don't really get a major epidemic at all."

A team on the ground has another advantage, he says: They know the terrain. After the Pakistan earthquake in 2005, the response from IRC didn't involve "flying people in from all over the world." A team in Pakistan that had been serving Afghan refugees for a couple decades was there in less than 24 hours, d'Harcourt says. They knew how to provide health care and basic needs, such as shelter "in a culturally appropriate way."

And it's easier for disaster victims to trust their fellow countrymen. In the early months of the Ebola outbreak, the citizens of West Africa often believed that the virus was part of a conspiracy — that Western doctors were making patients sick. Those rumors made many people reluctant to seek treatment. To debunk that kind of thinking, d'Harcourt says, you need fellow citizens who can say, "I know you think it's a plot, but here's why I don't think it's a plot."

D'Harcourt also believes that the idea of a rescue mission "infantilizes" people, treats them like children awaiting salvation. "You know, nobody, not even children, likes to be treated like children," he says. "I say this as a pediatrician. Children are always asking for more responsibility, more autonomy."

A textbook example of how a person native to a country can help, he says, is the story of Alpha Tamba, a Liberian physician's assistant. During the Ebola crisis, Tamba went to villages in hard-hit Lofa County and said to the villagers, this is what I can do — "what can you do?"

For example, he provided the chlorine and buckets for hand washing, but the villagers set up their own quarantines. When outsiders impose quarantines, d'Harcourt says, that doesn't always work out.

Of course, outsiders can, as Gates writes, play a critical role in quashing any future outbreak. But they have to have the right mindset and even the right garb. If workers come in with white helmets, says Dr. Joanne Liu, international president of Doctors Without Borders, "it gives them a sort of a militarized label. In my organization, we do not feel comfortable with the idea that there are blurred lines of humanitarian aid and military action."

She also stresses that any group of emergency workers must be prepared to follow orders from the agency they're working for. "You need people who are able to be disciplined, to follow the rules, so you would not put yourself in danger," she says.

Volunteers must heed both medical and cultural instructions, she says. A volunteer who thinks he or she knows it all could end up creating problems.

"You just cannot improvise and be the humanitarian Ebola tourist of the day," she says.

So Gates' essay is doing what it should be doing: opening up a conversation. "Now that Gates has written his article," Liu says, "I need to write mine."

One point she would make has to do with something as seemingly mundane as time away from work. Some medical workers in the U.S. were lined up and ready to go to West Africa, she recalls. But when it turned out they would miss not only a month of work when they were in the field, but another three weeks afterward for quarantine, "some of them just could not go."

WE MUST SUPPORT CHARITY: WATER

Last week I have known this charity. It's really fantastic and have a good aims and trying to help those in need all over the world. The water from the most basic rights to be enjoyed by the man, but in this world there are many areas that are not up to it water, This thing is very sad. The  goals of this charity Delivery of water to these areas and happiness to many people around the world, it's really amazing so we must support it please, visit this its site to know more Charity: Water. :)

THE NEW ART BY ALICE SMEETS

Welcome to the Ghetto Tarot, a project from award-winning documentary photographer Alice Smeets and a group of Haitian artists known as Atis Rezistans. The idea was to take the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck of 78 cards and create a photographic version of each card using settings and objects in the vibrant ghetto of Haiti.

As Smeets says, “The spirit of the Ghetto Tarot project is the inspiration to turn negative into positive while playing. The group of artists ‘Atiz Rezistans’ use trash to create art with their own visions that are a reflection of the beauty they see hidden within the waste. They are claiming the word ‘Ghetto,’ thus freeing themselves of its depreciating undertone and turning it into something beautiful.”

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