Pls take a few minutes to appreciate semiconductors & how difficult it's made

Photo memo: 'Dangerous work. Despite improvements in the semiconductor industry, chip making still requires the use of hazardous materials such as toxic solvents and metals, and few companies have adopted international occupational safety standards.'

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This made me think how our society often throws old computers & replaces it with new ones simply to have faster & bigger computer capacities. With competitive pricing, it's easier than ever to purchase one and throw the old one away. However, we need to get a grip of where we send our old computers to. We often think our old computers are sent to legitimate recycling centers. Think again people! It's not always that easy. Especially in our financial crisis, government agencies are pushing their limitations to save anything! This would then conclude that we are shipping our computers to developing nations such as China or Africa and let them do the work. Do you know how DIFFICULT it is to remove semiconductors?!? Third world countries do it manually! Do you think they have the most updated protective safety equipment?!? NO! It's hard as it is to come by a rubber glove or a face mask...These poor people who live near the removal sites are exposed to greater exposures to major injury for themselves and their families! Please take a moment to consider this...

Please check out http://www.ban.org/ & consider where our technological waste go to.

The coming of a 2-0-0-9

2008 has been wild. To our current economic tough times, new president, and natural disasters, this year has seen a bit of everything. As we proceed 2009, let us welcome the new year with a rejuvenated energy; A positive feeling so great that no negative energy can zap it away. Doesn't matter how much turmoil we may be feeling right now so long as we attract positive thoughts. The more we render on positive thoughts, it will attract us to give us good health, healthy financial background, and love all around.

As I did last year, I will reflect on my own successes/doings this year:

• Walked graduation during Spring semester (last semester of coursework) with a cummulative CSUF 3.45 GPA
• Successfully finished two internships (county of Orange & American Heart Association) & one graduate class (Geographic Information Systems for Public Health)
• Attended my first American Public Health Association conference (APHA)
• Went on a 3-day cruise to Mexico with Jose
• Went to Illinois for work/my 29th bday with Jose
• Continued to volunteer with CSP, Inc as Sexual Assault Counselor & voting volunteer with Orange County Asian & Pacific Islander Community Alliance during the election

As I ruminate in my own accomplishments, I am thankful for all that I have been blessed with. The opportunities, my family & friends, the everyday people that I come across to, and the inspiration I find in life.

Living with Inupiaq Eskimo's- Could I handle it?

So I stumbled upon this website as I was researching for occupational environment injuries & found it interesting. It made me question my own survival skills if I were to live in the ice with the Inupiaq Eskimo's. What a facinating group of people!

Luminous Landscape Forum _ Landscape & Nature Photography _ Home Sweet Home @ 50 below zero

http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?act=Print&client=printer&f=1&t=18236

I hope you find this site as I interesting as I did!

The Truth About Gratitude (from the Secret)

A Secret Scrolls message from Rhonda Byrne- Creator of The Secret

The greatest thief of human happiness and abundance is ungratefulness. Any lack in our lives - whether in money, health, or relationships - is simply the evidence of a lack of gratitude. If you focus on lack you are not being grateful, and that will bring more lack into your life. Yet the simple state of radiating gratitude summons everything to you.

No matter who you are or where you are, you can change your life with gratitude, but you must feel it with your whole heart and radiate it from every cell. Gratitude is not a mental exercise, and in fact, if you simply use your mind for gratitude it will have little or no power. True gratitude comes from your heart! You must think gratitude through your heart, speak gratitude through your heart, and feel it intensely in your heart.

Then practice gratitude relentlessly. As you practice gratitude you will attract more thoughts and feelings of gratitude. In a short time your entire being will be saturated with it, and you will experience a happiness that is beyond what you can imagine. This is what is ahead for you when you choose gratitude as your way of life. And if you can really live in this highest state of gratitude, you will never have to ask for anything. Everything you want will be given to you before you even ask, because gratitude is the magnetic substance that opens every single door in the Universe.

"Thank you" in as many ways as you can.
-Write a list of all the people and events you want to give thanks for.
-Return thanks today to those who have done things for you.
-As you walk say "Thank you" in your mind with each step you take.
-As you drive, make each time you stop your cue to say "Thank you."
-At various times in the day, think and feel "Thank you" inside you seven times in a row.
-Look for every opportunity to say "Thank you" to other people, and say it with so much meaning that the person looks right at you.

Thank you" - two words, inconceivable potential power, and all they need is you to put the power into them by expressing them.

Halloween 2008

This year, Jose & I went to West Halloweird to partake in an annual festivities of costume sharing, partying, and laughing. It was a fun experience and all the better made it convenient since Halloween was on Friday. Jose was Luchadore & I was Darth Vaderess (yes, I said it people...hehe). I purchased my Darth Vader children's mask two years ago for $0.99 & agreed to myself I'd finally use it. My costume was actually a pain-in-the-behind, the mask- well, I couldnt see properly (the eyeholes should have been cut). Additionally, I purchased a wig but because it was very long, it kept going everywhere...so long, it attached itself to my camera! We met up briefly with my cousin & his boyfriend.

The following day, we went to meet up with Kay who's friend was throwing a costume party. I revised my costume, no longer wearing the mask, rather attaching it to my cape. Let me tell you, much comfortable...

Article: Brain Drain: In Rural Philippines, a Dearth of Doctors

Washington Post, Sept 20, 2008

In Rural Philippines, a Dearth of DoctorsThousands of Physicians, Retrained as Nurses, Take Jobs Abroad

By Blaine HardenWashington Post Foreign ServiceSaturday, September 20, 2008

ANAHAWAN, Philippines -- The government hospital here is supposed to have seven doctors on staff. But five of them have left the country. They became nurses and are working in the United States. Their departure is part of a health-care brain drain that is strangling rural hospitals across the Philippines. Health services are declining, and the proportion of Filipinos dying without medical attention has risen to 70 percent -- a figure not seen in this country since the mid-1970s.

The Philippines has long been the world's biggest exporter of nurses, sending more than 164,000 of them abroad in recent decades. But since 2000, at least 11,000 Filipino doctors have decided to retrain as nurses and join the exodus. More than 6,000 doctors-turned-nurses have left the country, and about 5,000 more are soon to go, according to the Philippine Medical Association.

They do it for the money. In the United States, a nurse can make 10 times the $4,700 annual salary of a government doctor in this seaside town on the Philippine island of Leyte. But what about the patients left behind and the doctors who stay in the boondocks to care for them? At the hospital here, two physicians now serve a regional population of 110,000. To cover for the five doctors who left, they alternate solo shifts. Each works five consecutive 24-hour days, sleeping when and if the workload allows. (Doctors in government hospitals are not supposed to be on duty more than 48 straight hours.)

On a recent Friday morning, four days into his shift, Ernesto J. Cahoy, a physician who is also the hospital's chief of staff, made his daily rounds. The hospital's electricity supply had failed two days earlier, and a standby generator was broken.

Moving through the darkened corridors, Cahoy attended to the needs of 35 patients. He squinted to read their charts in hot, ill-lighted wards where children fussed and adults silently followed him with their eyes.
One very sick man had been admitted the previous afternoon. He appeared to be in his 60s and was severely malnourished. He died while Cahoy was examining him. The doctor did not know the cause of death, nor did he have time to think about it. He closed the man's chart, handed it to a nurse and moved on. Thirteen children required his attention in the pediatric ward. "We are trying to have a quality service here," Cahoy said. "But even if we try, considering there are only two doctors, the patients will be affected. You are bound to have some lapses in your treatment because you are really tired."

The weakening of health care in the Philippines is an unintended consequence of a decades-old government policy that vacuums professional talent out of the country. Since the early 1970s, when the government of President Ferdinand Marcos passed labor export legislation, Filipinos have been encouraged to go overseas, work as hard as they can and send money home. "The government says they are heroes and patriots when they leave," Cahoy said. In many ways, the mass export of humanity has succeeded. To a greater degree than any other country, the Philippines powers its economy with remittances, according to economists at the University of the Philippines. Filipinos working abroad sent home $12.8 billion in 2006, accounting for slightly more than 10 percent of the country's gross national product.

Since 2000, remittances have played a substantial role in reviving the Philippine economy, which last year grew at a robust rate of 7.2 percent. Growth, though, has dovetailed with nearly a decade of shrinking government spending on health care. At the same time, the government has done nothing to regulate the departure of doctors and other health-care professionals.

A bill introduced in the late 1990s to require all graduates of medical courses to serve two years in rural health-care centers died without debate. Last year, a similar bill to require service from graduates of government-funded medical courses also went nowhere. "We are the only country in Southeast Asia without a national health service requirement," said Jaime Z. Galvez Tan, a physician and professor at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, widely regarded as the country's best medical school. Galvez Tan has helped persuade his publicly funded medical school, beginning with the class that enrolls next year, to require three years of postgraduate work in the Philippines. It is the country's only medical or nursing school, public or private, to impose such a requirement.

The Philippines does not yet have a shortage of doctors, just a shortage of them in poor rural areas, according to Rey Melchor F. Santos, a physician who is president of the Philippine Medical Association.
"Most of the rural hospitals do not have enough doctors," he said. "We know there are rural hospitals that are no longer operating because they have no medical manpower."

Across the country, more and more nursing schools are busy turning doctors into nurses. With poorly paid government doctors as their primary source of students, these schools are part of an astonishing spike in nursing education in the Philippines. In less than a decade, the number of nursing schools has almost tripled, from 170 in 1999 to at least 470 now.

As nursing schools boom, medical schools wither, in part because it is much harder for a Philippine-trained doctor to pass medical board exams in a foreign country than for a Filipino nurse to be certified abroad.
Santos said that the global demand for nurses, combined with the convenient availability of nursing schools throughout the Philippine islands, has triggered a 40 to 50 percent drop in the number of students enrolling in medical schools in the past four years. "The view of greener pastures is making them go directly into nursing," he said. "I guess they are thinking that they might as well go into nursing for a four-year course and skip the nine years of medical training. If this trend continues, then it is going to produce a shortage of doctors in a few years."

The medical association and other physicians' groups here are trying to get foreign governments to acknowledge the adverse consequences of the global job market on the health of poor Filipinos. They want foreign countries to compensate the Philippines for the cost of medical training and for the socioeconomic impact of the brain drain.

"We would like to hold accountable the governments who have imported our people," Galvez Tan said. "Let there be ethical recruitment. They should pay enough to educate three medical professionals here for every one they take away." Galvez Tan said he has received a sympathetic hearing from government officials in Finland and Canada, but not from the United States.

Asked about the medical brain drain, the American ambassador to the Philippines, Kristie A. Kenney, said that she has "never heard it discussed" and that she doubted the United States could "afford" such compensation. Here at Anahawan District Hospital, Cahoy said he sees nothing that can be done to keep doctors on staff. He accommodated the five doctors who retrained as nurses, arranging their work schedules so they could attend nursing school on the nearby island of Cebu.

Cahoy, 57, said he has never seriously thought of becoming a nurse and leaving the country, although his sister, who lives in New Jersey, has told him he should. The government has invested a lot of time and money in his training, which has included postdoctoral courses in surgery, orthopedics, obstetrics and X-ray examination, he said. "I have to stay," he said. "I owe it to the government." But Cahoy intends to work here for only three more years. "At the age of 60, I will have to retire," he said. "I am really tired."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903678_pf.html

Trip to Illinois- August trip

When: Aug.11.2008-Aug.17.2008
Reason: Risk Control Workshop in Itasca; 29th Birthday; Never traveled to Chicago; Visiting Jose's relatives; V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N

Highlights of the trip (in no particular order):
-Boat tour on Lake Michigan (inc. watching jets practice for the weekend air show)
-Watching Cirque Shanghai
-Millenium Park
-Hanging out with the kids
-Food!, including Jose's notorious German pancake from Walker Bros.
-Lunch on 95th floor of the John Hancock building & observatory
-Food, prepared by Jose's relatives
-Church mass in downtown
-A taste of the Dead Sea (Jose's uncle brought a bottle back; words cannot express how salty it is)
-so many more...

July was tough...

Emotionally-draining, emotionally stressing
The pain that has murmured over all these years
The tears that will not stop caressing my face
Sour endless taste
Personal despair
For I continue to fear
Rut
Like a one-cockeyed, three-headed rut
Multiplied by migraine, after migraine
Neverending ringing of soul-bashing
Character-hurting
Playing the victim

We all need to heal
I NEED to heal
For I cannot continue to bear this pain
I pray that God continues to comfort me in His arms
For without Him, I am Nothing.

...Upsetting

A lot of times, I feel that I have to be put on this tough guy, tough girl persona but in the end, I'm just like you and me. Sometimes I have to breakdown in order to get back up.

This week I found myself very angry at some of my colleagues simply because of their selfish habits. I was very fired up by this. As a result I took action "the incorrect way". Someone gave me constructive criticism today; It helped me to understand that sometimes being too nice or being too angry will not work, simply because people are stubborn, hard-headed individuals.

I am an advocate for so many things; In several ways, I feel this is a good trait to have because I strive to take action; I strive to take action to what I feel is right or necessary. I advocate for people, for things, to correct wrongdoings into right. I have the passion. I have the energy. Unfortunately, it can be a double edged sword because every time I put deep amounts of energy bursts, I am also stressing my internal body.

This week has been that week. I felt weak. I felt achy. I felt sore. Headaches.

1 Corinthians 13

1 Corinthians 13

I may speak in the languages of humans and of angels. But if I don't have love, I am a loud gong or a clashing cymbal. I may have the gift to speak what God has revealed, and I may understand all mysteries and have all knowledge. I may even have enough faith to move mountains. But if I don't have love, I am nothing. I may even give away all that I have and give up my body to be burned. But if I don't have love, none of these things will help me.

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love isn't jealous. It doesn't sing its own praises. It isn't arrogant. It isn't rude. It doesn't think about itself. It isn't irritable. It doesn't keep track of wrongs. It isn't happy when injustice is done, but it is happy with the truth. Love never stops being patient, never stops believing, never stops hoping, never gives up.

Love never comes to an end. There is the gift of speaking what God has revealed, but it will no longer be used. There is the gift of speaking in other languages, but it will stop by itself. There is the gift of knowledge, but it will no longer be used. Our knowledge is incomplete and our ability to speak what God has revealed is incomplete. But when what is complete comes, then what is incomplete will no longer be used. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I no longer used childish ways. Now we see a blurred image in a mirror. Then we will see very clearly. Now my knowledge is incomplete. Then I will have complete knowledge as God has complete knowledge of me.

So these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the best one of these is love.

Graduation Photographs- Sun, 5/18/08

I AM SELFISH

"I AM SELFISH" by MZ

I am a selfish prick
Somebody fuckn throw me a brick
At me
So I'll be hit
Start bleeding
On my upper & lower cracked lip
Next to the tip of my wide round ass
So I'll land on the green covered-with-shit grass
Next to my brass covered, one diamond ring
Someone can you bring?
Some big or small thing
That will console me from this pain
When it feels like thunderstorm, hail & rain
When it's always pouring
Touring
Looking for consolement
Will stop myself hidden from concealment

Some one can you help me?
Tear these metal mental chains so I'll be free
So I will no longer be
in this pain.
Help me....
Can you see?
Are you blind?
All I want is to be is
free
free
free

I want is to sit back, breathe, relax
No, I don't want to take any LAXative
I want to live happily
joyously
And believe
God is with me
I am protected
I hope I will never experience being rejected
That's inevitable cause it’s life
Hold me tight
So I can't take any flight elsewhere
From this pain of remorse
Help me to heal from this mental pain
So I will no longer be a selfish prick.

Mothers Day 2008

I am thankful for my Mother. I am a part of Her. She is Amazing. She is Beautiful. She is Multi-talented. She is an Inspiration. She is Courageous. She is Driven. She is Smart. She is Noteworthy. She is one of God's children. I feel privileged to say I am her Daughter. (Lunch @ The Octopus, Brea)

Graduating Poem

Announced Friday, May 9 at the 9th Annual Filipino American Graduation Celebration

Annihilate the negativity
Exhibit positive productivity
I strive to be the best that I can be
Perhaps one day be the next extraordinary
Revolutionary

You see everyone,
I relocated back to my hometown of LA,
After living in the Northern California East Bay,
Ultimate reason,
Being,
In order to go back to school,
To expand my lifelong tool,
Of education,
Growth & inner activation,
Inspiration,
Self-renovation,
It’s taken me 3 long arduous, stressful years,
Self-driven, a multi-tasking mogul of several responsibilities ,
So that I can complete my Bachelors Health Science degree,
And begin to create interventions for several communities.

My gratitude extends to God, my creator above ,
Who gives me His unending Love,
from my dear supportive family, my parents Linda, Victor, and brother, Jepoy
Oh boy,
Be aware
There's my boyfriend, Jose,
what can i say? He's great.
My cousins, Val, Larry, JP who's been w/ me through my personal history.
So has my friends, Thomas & Kay.
Who's laid.
Beside me through laughter & tears.
…These people are the instruments in my life.

Plant the seed and push for peace, because we are one global Filipino family!

Health Science Symposium

Tuesday, April 28 was the Health Science Symposium at California State University, Fullerton. The symposium is a celebration of graduate and undergraduate students. MPH graduates also have the opportunity to display their research poster presentations. Eta Sigma Gamma, the Health Science Honorary Society also gives awards to students & faculty. I was fortunate to receive the Distinguished Service Award. My immediate family, cousin & boyfriend were all present.

SF Trip- 50th Wedding Anniversary

Val's Bday

My dear cousin, Val turns 24 yrs old on Valentine's Day