The joint winners of the Angolan contest, Augusta Urica, 31, and Maria Restino Manuel, 26, were the embodiment of Traavik's ideal at the finale in the capital, Luanda, swathed in designer gowns, sashes and silver tiaras that crowned them Miss Landmine 2008.

With 10 women representing their provinces, she hobbled up the platform on crutches to collect her prize - a golden, state-of-the-art prosthetic limb to replace the leg blown off 10 years ago.

In Cambodia there should be no shortage of contenders for the 2009 title. There are 25,000 amputees among the country's 63,000 victims of landmines and blasts from unexploded ordinance left after 30 years of civil war.

Up to 1m landmines remain buried, out of the estimated million mines planted along the border with Thailand after the invading Vietnamese left in 1989

What I set out to achieve - indeed I think we've achieved it already -
was to highlight globally a very serious and unnecessary social
problem," said Traavik . This contest attracts attention to the issue,
but it also challenges our western way of looking at the third world.
I'm so fed up of social campaigns with black and white photos of
Africans or Cambodians, in rags."

Good for them. It hurts to see this.....but so it should I suppose.

It's a better reason to have a beauty pageant than many in the USA and I'l wager the winners can speak a coherent sentence unlike that young lady we saw here recently.

And that’s proof of making lemonade when the worlds give you lemons

Clever.

Clever, thought provoking, relevant, life saving, worthy, .....