المقدمة

(title translation: the introduction)

it may be a little too early to do this since i'm not leaving until the middle of september, but it's a typically lazy saturday afternoon and i don't feel like cleaning.

this blog, for all intents and purposes, is to help document my 13 months in the Sultanate of Oman. i was recently awarded a grant by the Fulbright U.S. Student Program (sponsored by the Institute of International Education) to study Arabic and to support my research of the Omani Women's Association (I'm officially affiliated with the Ministry of Social Development).

to answer the typically asked question, "why oman?" ... if you had asked me 13 months ago about the Sultanate, i would not have been able to tell you very much. i graduated in may 2006 from the college of william & mary in virginia with a degree in international relations concentrating in middle east studies. grad school was potentially in the future following my summer internship, but i know that all i wanted to do was to travel the region and submerse myself in the middle east culture (the only other country in the region i had visited was morocco, where i studied arabic for 6 weeks in the summer of 2005). but thanks to the aforementioned internship at the Middle East Institute's Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center and subsequently a part-time assistant position at the latter, this relatively small country on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula has captured my scholarly mind and tantilize my tastebuds for travel and adventure.

here is a link to my place of (soon-to-be former) employment, the aforementioned Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center. sqcc is the major reason why i have chosen to study oman in such depth and the main resource for my current knowledge about the country. through the SQCC, i have made several contacts in the region, both native omanis and americans working there, and am very excited to see them all again and to make new friends. i would appreciate it (and i'm sure my boss would, too) if you visited the website, since we have worked so hard on it, and i really feel that it contains relatively comprehensive information about the country.

i suppose later in the summertime i'll update this more often with my thoughts, feelings and concerns about leaving my home and family for 13 months, but for now, i guess i'm in search of a proper grammar book so i won't have so many descrepancies about capitalizing one instance of a word and not the other. my stomach is grumbling, so i suppose i shall have to satiate my hunger before grabbing that grammar book.

ma'salaama wa ila liqa'!