Each year Seventeen Magazine organizes the competition "Pretty Amazing", a contest for 15-22 years old girls who tell stories that can inspire other people of the same age. One of the finalists of the 2013 edition was 18 year old Paige Rawl. At 14 she became the youngest HIV educator at the American Red Cross. She was born with HIV and discovered being infected when she was 12. After having come out as HIV+, she experienced many bullying experiences at school, so that she was forced to home-school. Paige realized that people of her age (13-15) know very little about what HIV/AIDS is and even less about how it is living as a seropositive person and for this reason she decided to act up to change the situation. First of all she helped an anti-bullying bill to pass in her home state Indiana and she is now traveling around her country to talk about her experiences in schools - here's the link for Paige's video.

It's sad she could not win the "Pretty Amazing" award; that prize went to Stacey Ferreira (21), the starter of the "My Social Cloud" project, an online storage system for private passwords that got a 1 million dollarsinvestment from Richard Branson (Virgin) -pretty amazing too, I must say.

We wish good luck to both of them, even though these girls can clearly rock without our help. We obviously will keep an eye to Paige's next moves, hoping she can find other tough girls like her, we need more of them!

The finalits of the contest: