Angela McNamara and her husband Mike Vaughan get through 200 eggs a week. Every two hours, day and night, she has a meal (a choice of porridge, egg whites, fish, chicken or steak and vegetables).

She gets up at 6am and trains for one and a half hours, and she repeats the exercises twice more during the course of the day. The result: a 46in chest, a 30 inch waist -- and muscles that make her Ireland's top woman bodybuilder.

Next month, 37-year-old bodybuilder Angela from Limerick will compete in the Republic of Ireland Bodybuilding Federation's Championships to defend her title as Miss Ireland.

"I only started competing two years ago but already I've done 16 competitions and come first in every single one of them. Bodybuilding is in my blood; my mum was an Irish champion, my dad was a boxer, my sister competes, and back in the 1940s my granddad was a strongman -- for as long as I can remember we would go to gyms after school instead of going straight home," she says.

Sonia Nassery Cole knew that shooting a movie on location in Afghanistan could get her killed. The most vivid reminder came a few weeks before filming, she said, when militants located her leading actress and cut off both of her feet.

But Ms. Cole, an Afghan expatriate with a flair for the dramatic and a history of not taking no for an answer, had her mind made up. Unable to find another actress to take the part — the film is overtly critical of the Taliban — Ms. Cole, 45, decided to play the role herself.

“Come hell, come shine, I was going to make this movie,” said Ms. Cole, a novice filmmaker whose primary job is running the Afghanistan World Foundation, a charity focused on refugees and women’s rights.

Girl Scouts is a great organization that encourages girls to work hard in all that they do and inspires them to give back to their community by making the world a better place. But Girl Scout Shannon McNamara decided to take those lessons a bit further and step outside her own community by making a difference in a community thousands of miles away, in Tanzania.

Shannon had certainly been no stranger to helping kids on the other side of the world. She had been joining her family on trips to Costa Rica, Guatemala, China and Peru where they had been volunteering to teach english to primary school children for years. Shannon began working on her Girl Scout Gold Award, which includes creating a project that fulfills a need within a girl’s community (whether local or global), creates change, and hopefully, is something that becomes ongoing.

Posted by Vicky Collins
August 30, 2010

Susan notes: This amazing, uplifting, inspirational story of success and connection was produced by AWR member Vicky Collins, a Colorado-based TV producer and photographer.r. It highlights what is possible when women around the world support each other.

My name is Vicky Collins and I'm a television producer out of Denver, Colorado, USA. Our team has made three trips to Uganda over the last five years to help tell the stories of Ugandan women (see Beads, Bricks And A Better Life below).

We mostly do video production for BeadforLife, an income generating project that helps women raise their families up from extreme poverty.

The Ugandan women make beautiful bead jewellery out of recycled paper. Then other women around the world sell the jewellery at bead parties and online and return the profits to Uganda to help with health care, education, housing and other community programs.