A Match Truly Made in Heaven

(http://www.zawaj.com/misyar-marriages/saudi-arabian-couple/ - picture)

So last night was my first encounter with a Saudi couple that is HIV positive.Now you may be asking yourself so what's the big deal. Well in this part of the world it is a big deal simply because many of the HIV positive people living here are what I term as "faceless". They usually prefer being treated at home through a home health care based facility and usually all their medications are sent directly to their homes through the hospital DHL delivery system.
In South Africa I have dealt with hundreds of HIV positive patients throughout my career. I was one of the pharmacists who initiated the HIV clinic at Leratong hospital. But somehow meeting a Saudi couple that were both HIV positive was quite different.And the reason it felt so different was because they were open and honest about their medical condition.They spoke about HIV as though they had the common  cold or a flu.The man contracted HIV through a blood transfusion during his childhood after being involved in a motor vehicle accident and the young woman contracted HIV at birth after both her parents were infected with the virus.She said that she had never anticipated getting married and leading a normal married life with the exception that they both have unanimously agreed not to bring a child into this world. They both oozed with so much of positive energy, laughing, joking and just being themselves.They apparently met at an HIV workshop that both their families attended."It was love at first sight",  he said after seeing her beautiful emerald green eyes."That was all he could see of course", she interrupted whilst laughing.
 The mind definitely has the power to conquer any disease.What usually seems to happen though when a patient is told that they have cancer or HIV, they immediately go into a phase of denial and with denial comes depression and anxiety that by the time the patient has in fact made peace with themselves and accepted their medical condition much time has already elapsed and the patient is far too weak physically to combat the disease.Negative thinking has the power to eat your body away.If the patient is positive from the beginning, going through life's daily activities in a somewhat normal manner miracles do happen. I certainly seen that last night. As the saying goes, "the mind is its own place, and in itself  can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven".The couple I met last night certainly made me realize that has a society we are quick to judge people,create stigmas and may be even look down at people with HIV. It is about time that society embraces people that are HIV positive.We need to change peoples mindsets.Some people believe that if a patient is HIV positive it is due to their own risky promiscuous sexual life and so this is a punishment from God. Whilst that is true, the mistake is done. We can not turn back the clock and change whats already done and over with. Instead of letting these patients waste away through regret and depression, through feeling sad and useless, we need to accept these individuals and start treating them as normal human beings. We need to fill their lives with happiness so that they can adopt a positive outlook to life and sometimes just changing a persons attitude is enough to pave their way to better health and full cure in some cases.

As I walked home last night, making my way down the long deserted corridor, stopping halfway to have a cup of Arabic coffee (Qahwa) with my friend Sultan, I couldn't help but think about the happy couple I had encountered earlier.They were an inspiration to me. Images of their bright beaming faces just kept on appearing in front of me and so there was only one thought that came to mind and that was, they are truly a match made in heaven!!!! May the Almighty always keep them happy and shower His choicest blessings upon them wherever they are.........

Attitude leads to Altitude

A close friend of mine sent me this article through email. I thought it was quite an inspirational piece of writing and hence I decided to share it with all of you.I do not know who wrote this article and I certainly do not take credit for it.

Ayoob was the kind of person who would always amaze you. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, "If I were any better, I would be twins!"

He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Ayoob was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day Ayoob was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Ayoob and asked him, "I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?"

Ayoob replied, "Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ' Ayoob, Allah has given you two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.' I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life."

"Yeah, right, it's not that easy," I protested.

"Yes, it is," Ayoob said. "Life is all about choices Allah has given us. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: Allah has given you an option how you live your life!"

I reflected on what Ayoob said. Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life before reacting to it.

Several years later, I heard that Ayoob did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers. While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Alhamdulillah , Ayoob was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local hospital’s trauma centre.

After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Ayoob was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Ayoob about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, "Alhamdulillah , Allah is so Great and so Merciful” and then he added “If I were any better, I'd be twins. Wanna see my scars?"

I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place. "The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door," Ayoob replied. "Then, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that Allah had given me two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live. By the Will and Acceptence of Allah I choose to live and Allah accepted my dua"

"Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness?" I asked.

Ayoob continued, "The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, 'He's a dead man.'

"I knew I needed to take action."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me," said Ayoob. "She asked if I was allergic to anything. 'Yes,' I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, 'Bullets!' Over their laughter, I told them. 'I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead."

Ayoob lived thanks to Allah who made available skilled doctors at this critical moment and also because of his amazing attitude that Allah had given him. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully.

Attitude, after all, is so important! We may not be feeling happy or at ease at the moment, however we can still show a smile on our face or share a few friendly words and kind gestures. Often times, it is simply our attitudes that can influence someone or inspire someone to seek Islam. It is so paramount to live in obedience to Allah, but it is not just the service to others and the code we follow that we must keep in check, it is also the attitude we carry along with all of our actions. It only takes a second to affect a person in a bad or good way, and this may very well depend not on your actions or deeds, but simply upon the attitude you have at that second. If you carry a frown walking into a house where there are guests, they may feel un-welcomed. The frown may only last a few moments, but that will be long enough to leave a bad impression on some hearts.

*

The Messenger of Allah Muhammad (Sallallaho alaihe wasallam) has said: "Almighty Allah says, 'I treat my slave (man) according to his expectations from Me, and I am with him when he remembers me" [Hadith-qudsi]  

A good positive Attitude in this world will raise you to a high Altitude in Paradise

A Strange Encounter

Ever heard the phrase, "No party is a party without the booze, women and music"...After thirty years of existence in this big wide world I still fail to see the logic behind this recipe of doom and disaster. So whilst taking a jog with a colleague of mine during the early parts of the morning around the compound, just before the morning prayers(Fajr salaah), we meet up with our friend from the security department who was having an altercation with three blonde American women(blond bimbos in my opinion). It was pretty obvious that they were stone drunk and hence they were making a complete fool of themselves. The guard offered to assist them back to their apartments.Whilst walking to the apartment the one woman decides to open up her a'baya and naturally there was absolutely no clothes underneath with the exception of unmentionables. The second woman(giggling away like a school girl) opened up her handbag and started waving a sex toy in a provocative manner to the security guard and the third woman blatantly asked the guard to engage in sexual intercourse with her.So once the guard drops them off at their respective rooms he runs back with three cups of coffee. He tells us how can these "loose" women be treating our patients. Do they not have a sense of shame and decency or self respect. How can the world respect women like these when they have no respect for themselves. Is n't it shocking for professional women to behave in this lewd, cheap manner?

I then started thinking about what he said. These are the same type of  women that the western world deems as liberated and free.Naturally a woman that is adorned in Hijaab (a scarf) or a veil is viewed by western standards as backward, stupid and uneducated.A woman in the west is judged based on outer adornment and so as proven by statistics the sluttier she dresses the more successful she will be within the corporate environment irrespective of how knowledgeable she really is.I thank God, that I am a Muslim woman. I will not trade my hijaab, my Islamic culture and lifestyle for anyone.I am proud to cover myself and give myself the respect a woman deserves.What is sad though is that this whole female revolution that rocked the west is trying to make its way here in the Middle East as well. With America being Saudi Arabia's closest ally, it doesn't surprise me that there is a strong push towards promoting a culture whereby Saudi women fit in with the western ideal of how a woman should be.What goes on within the compounds is shocking. Drug and alcohol fueled raucous parties are nothing new to compound life.Sexual promiscuity is rife and many a time women fall pregnant and then resort to backstreet abortions or simply leave the country.Yes folks, this is the reality of many expat women living here.Would I trade my lifestyle to fit in with the western concept of how a woman should be.. The answer is..HELL NO.. I rather be portrayed as backward and uneducated rather than making a complete ass of myself in public..So much for western ideals.

The Great Swine Flu Hoax

Article written by Mike Adams

"The great swine flu hoax of 2009 is now falling apart at the seams as one country after another unloads hundreds of millions of doses of unused swine flu vaccines. No informed person wants the injection anymore, and the entire fear-based campaign to promote the vaccines has now been exposed as outright quackery and propaganda."

Even doctors are now calling the pandemic a complete hoax. As reported on Fox News, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a leading health authority in Europe, says that drug companies "organized a 'campaign of panic' to put pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a pandemic. He believes it is 'one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,' and he has called for an inquiry."

H1N1 swine flu was never dangerous, and it never should have been escalated to a level-six pandemic in the first place. It was all a big marketing scam whose purpose was to simply sell vaccines. (And the CDC and WHO were in on it...)

And it worked! Big Pharma made out with billions of dollars in profits for a useless vaccine that's now being dumped by the truck load. These vaccines were, of course, paid for with taxpayer dollars, making the Great Swine Flu Hoax of 2009 nothing more than an elaborate financial scam whose goal was to transfer wealth from the People to the shareholders of Big Pharma.
In just the fourth quarter of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline shipped $1.4 billion worth of vaccines.

That's $1.4 billion worth of taxpayer dollars, by the way. Dollars that could have been spent on nutrition or real health education. $1.4 billion worth of free vitamin D supplements would have done far more to protect public health than vaccines could ever hope to accomplish.

Wall Street hucksters have nothing on Big Pharma, the CDC and the WHO, all of which conspired to mislead the public and generate irrational fear in order to make money selling people vaccine shots they never needed in the first place.
The drug companies raked in billions of dollars in revenues while providing a product that offered absolutely no net reduction in mortality. In fact, as the long-term side effects of the vaccines remain unknown, it could turn out that the vaccines actually result in a net increase in mortality.

Meanwhile, countless people were harmed by the swine flu vaccine frenzy (it's "countless" because nobody's counting). In addition to those who were nearly paralyzed after receiving the vaccine shots, grade school staffers in Massachusetts who lined up to receive swine flu vaccine shots were instead injected with insulin.
Total swine flu deaths for 2009 were far lower than the number of deaths from regular seasonal flu. And yet it turns out that thousands of Americans who died from the swine flu had been previously injected with the vaccines  In fact, according to calculations derived from official CDC estimates, thousands of vaccinated Americans died from swine flu anyway. The vaccines, it seems, don't really work after all. You're just as safe doing nothing. Here in Saudi Arabia three deaths were reported supposedly from swine flu which naturally created panic and sent hundreds of patients to various hospitals throughout the Kingdom  to be vaccinated. But what the media did not tell the public was that the three patients who died were immuno-compromised in the first place. Two of them were in ICU connected to various artificial breathing devices and the the third patient was old with various other health complications. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there was something drastically fishy about the whole H1N1 debacle. Usually prior to any medication being released on the market it undergoes years of clinical trials. First it is tested on animals and then it is tested on human beings in various different parts of the world. The H1N1 vaccine came into the market over a short space of time. When questioned about the ingredients of the vaccine, the manufacturing company refused to divulge this information. Health care workers at various hospitals were asked to be vaccinated with the new H1N1 vaccine. As a health care professional myself I refused to be vaccinated with a product that has no clear clinical data. Many of my doctor colleagues refused to be vaccinated as well. A good doctor friend of mine told me that some of his patients who took the vaccine reported various degrees of adverse side effects that ranged from rash, skin irritability, blurred vision, pain in the hands and feet, sluggish movement.

The bottom line is, getting the vaccine may harm your health. Outspoken Dr. Wodarg says that the full extent of the damage from the insufficiently-tested vaccines may not be known for years. "The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now," he says.
Just what we need, huh? Cancer cells being injected into the population as part of a vaccine campaign.

The Swine Flu hoax has fizzled out, and countries like Greece, France and the UK have cancelled orders for vaccines that they now realize won't be needed  But even the fizzling of this hoax doesn't mean it was a failure from the point of view of Big Pharma.

The swine flu hoax was a huge success not only for drug company profits, but also for certain influential individuals including Dr Julie Gerberding, former head of the CDC who has now accepted a high-paying job
as the president of Merck's global vaccine operations.
One minute you're running the CDC, warning the country about a pandemic while urging everybody to get vaccinated, and the next minute you're running the for-profit vaccine division of the world's largest drug company. Amazing how that works, huh?

Source:

http://www.naturalnews.com/027984_swine_flu_vaccines.html