"Eid al-Ab" (Father's Day) and a Day of Dialogue

This morning, at breakfast (and before I could even recall what day of the week it was, let alone the specific date!), I was greeted with a huge hug and a kiss from Grace for Father's Day (Eid al-Ab).  What a way to start any day!

And then to work ... we opened our Dialogue of Arab and Western Youth with remarks from Dr. Waduda Badran, Director of the Arab Women's Organization, and Dr. Moataz Abdel-Fattah, Dialogue Organizer for the AWO, and myself, as Director of our Dialogue of Civilizations Program at Northeastern.  Afterwards, we divided our students among the 7 research topics - Health, Education, Media, Society, Politics, Economy/Business, Legal Issues - and they got down to work.  And did they work!!   Students and their fellow Dialoguers/Researchers from 14 Arab Countries spent the entire day, until 5:45 pm, discussing these key issues with a specific focus on women and girls and how they are connected with, involved in, and affected by these general topics (e.g., female literacy rates in both the USA and the Arab world, girls' and women's access to health care, women in politics, the image of women in the media, women's legal rights, women in business -- all of these topics looking into American and various Arab societies).  

I, on the other hand, in addition to helping Dr. Moataz keep our dialoguers organized and on-task, spent much of the morning in interviews with Arab media -- all in Arabic!   Both print media as well as television, I tested my language skills - including the fact that I speak Egyptian dialect, and we are in the Gulf, so the dialects are quite different!  But I did spend much of my time sincerely thanking Her Highness Sheikha Fatma Bint Mubarak, President of the AWO, for her indescribable generosity and hospitality in providing all means necessary to get our NU-25 to Abu Dhabi, to provide accommodations and sustenance and all the creature comforts and more than we could ever imagine!  Shukran jaziilan Your Highness Sheikha Fatma!

This evening, all of the Arab and American women had the option of going to a women-only spa.  We will deconstruct this later ... the notion of separation of women from the men, the upside and the downside (the "separation" vs. the "segregation") ... but culturally, for some Arab societies (but definitely not all!), this separation is a necessity; yet some of our Arab female dialoguers find it as quaint (or perhaps "difficult to accept") as our American female participants.  But nor did this stop both Arab and American women from going to the spa!  And I joined several of our male participants and a few Arab women who chose against the spa and took a trip to one of the malls ... think of Chestnut Hill mall and add a few "stars" to its ranking, plus a "snow mountain" in  the center of this mall.  

And now, 9:30 pm, off to dinner:  the non-stop, help-yourself, all-you-can-eat banquet of all sorts of dishes and treats from all over the globe ... I think our students will have gained a few more pounds this week, as will I (unfortunately ... but then again, it is Father's Day!)