Accreditation Visit - Day 1

Today was my first 'working day' in Oman. After taking an interview over Webex with the CIT for a board role, I met with the rest of the team (Prof Chris Johnson and Prof Marilyn Wells) to be collected by Sohar University and driven to the campus.

The drive was easy and fast on big, wide, new freeway infrastructure and took about 12 minutes of the predicted up to 30 minutes. We arrived at Sohar University and it was suspiciously quiet.

Sohar University (Library building) from the forecourt

We were met just in front of the tent-style structures you see in the photo by our host Sanad, the Faculty Dean, Ahmad, and one of the members of the University's Quality Assurance group, Tina. They explained that it was so quiet because no students were on campus today, because of the (predicted) rain. As Tina commented, they (Oman) are not set up to deal with rain. Later inspection validated that roads don't have gutters and drains and when it rains, the water just pools or flows into wadis (creeks/rivers) that flow over the roads unchecked.

As it happens, it did rain quite hard during the day and when we drove home there was much standing water. Traffic on the trip home was terrible too because of the wet conditions and standing water.

The day was very productive for our accreditation activities (notwithstanding that we couldn't interview students as scheduled) and we were generously hosted by Sohar University.

Tonight will be dinner in the hotel again because the rain makes travelling around much more demanding for non-locals. We'll venture out to a local Omani restaurant tomorrow, or that's the plan.

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