PRESS RELEASE

FEMALE-ONLY HEALTH SEMINAR BY CONTACT PAKISTAN

BY: FAIZ AL-NAJDI On Friday the 15th of September-006, the long awaited ContactPakistan (CP)
Female-only Health Awareness  Seminar was finally held in the auditorium of Saudi-German Hospital here in the capital city of Riyadh. This was the third program in a row being organized by CP under the title "Healthy Community Healthy Pakistan" to generate health awareness amongst the compatriot Pakistanis, especially amongst the women folks. This program campaign of CP is called Healthy Community-Healthy Pakistan. ContactPakistan (www.contactpakistan.com) is a web-based Pakistani Virtual Welfare Organization. It is a non-commercial entity which is purely community driven and operates on a slogan of, "Together We can Make a Difference". It has a world-wide membership of about 800,000 and in Saudi Arabia alone its following is close
to 29,000. This makes CP as the largest of its kind in the world. It can also be termed as the world's largest
Virtual NGO. This seminar was widely attended from the broad spectrum of the Pakistani female community here in Riyadh.
This attendance of a large number of women in the Seminar per se speaks volumes about the success of this Female-only Health Awareness Seminar. It also indicates how health conscious the Pakistani women folks are. The program commenced on time with a recitation from the Holy Quran which was ably done by Ms. Shama
Munir. This was followed with an equally impressive & inspiring Naat recitation from Umm-e-Tahir.
The program continued with a very thought-provoking speech by Ms. Narjis Asif -  one of the key persons behind
overall organization of this program. A speech by Bushra Tahir (also popularly known internationally as BJ for her
works on introducing new cuisines for women world-wide; refer to a segment on CP newsletter on "cooking with BJ.Com") was delivered by her husband Tahir Butt owing to she being physically indisposed that particular day. Her speech eulogized the efforts being made by CP in serving the Pakistani community and she also underscored the importance of Pakistani women taking up their respective roles in the society in a most effective & positive manner. The main program was then set in motion and as per the program the first lecture was delivered by Dr. Yasmin Sardar
Khan who is currently working as an Infertility Specialist at the Security Forces Hospital in Riyadh. The topic of her
talk was, "Menopausal Symptoms and its Management".
The second talk on "Osteoporosis" was delivered by Dr. Erum Sheikh. Dr. Erum works in RAFH in the department of
family and community medicine as a Family Physician.
The third and final lecture was delivered by Dr. Tehreem Irfan Khan. Her topic was "Iron Deficiency Anemia". She is
currently pursuing her masters program in Human Health & Nutrition.
All lectures were beautifully designed and delivered in Urdu for easy and better communication with the attendee
participants most of whom found it easy and comfortable with Urdu. All the talks were so ably delivered and were so interesting that the hall remained in a pin-drop silence mode through out the proceedings. This means the attendee participants found the lectures to be interesting, easy to understand and above all very useful. This was evident from the barrages of questions that were put to the respective speakers during the
question-hour session. So much so that the program eventually over ran the time allocated for the same and it had to be eventually curtailed to meet the time deadline. The interest shown in this program was quite visible from the feed-back received verbally on the day from the attendee participants followed with scores of emails from across the length and
breadth of Saudi Arabia especially from Dammam, AlKhobar in the Eastern province and from Jeddah in the Western
province, with a desire & request for arranging similar programs for women in their respective cities as well.
The entire program was efficiently anchored by Ms. Narjis Asif and was very well supported by an agile team of her very efficient & hospitable colleagues namely Ms. Ambreen Faiz, Ms. Samina Shahid, Ms. Fatima Amir, Miss. Saadia,
Miss. Rubab Faiz, Miss. Madiha, Miss. Shaheen, Miss. Mehreen Butt and Miss. Rabia Khokhar. Finally, this Female-only program would not have been a success if it were not because of timeless efforts from a few
Male individuals also who worked day in and day out behind the scene in order to make this program see the lights of the day. The noted amongst them were; Tahir Butt (owner & manager of CP), Dr. Irfan Khan & Dr. Usmani (from CP medical Team), Tariq Mahmood (from CP Marketig Team) and Ali Asif Rashid from CP Newsletter Editorial Team.