Blue Chi’s

Just came from the Initlaaqah workshop @ SQU. It was not too bad. I’ve never been a natural public speaker, but I think that I’m improving. I was not fully prepared, I had no idea what I would be speaking about until about 24 hours before the event, I did not end up talking about being productive in your free time like I said in my previous post, but made a short talk about the one person/multiple careers culture that I’m practising – I even mentioned the book.

Random Tidbits:

• Even though I work at a ministry, we’re not one that offers a public service, so I’m not actually exposed to so much cultural diversity as I saw today in SQU, heard about a dozen accents in a single room, really cool.
• The ratio of girls to boys in the room was about 8 to 1.
• I was called Ridha, Raed, Tariq, and Talib in a single session. Is my name REALLY that hard to remember?!

When asked about their after uni plans, SQU students stated that they would be looking for a job in the-field-of-their-study. This is a huge cultural difference between our mentality and western/american culture where people do not necessarily care much about working in the same field of their study, many Omani students thought it was very important to mention that their future job MUST BE RELATED TO THEIR FIELD OF STUDY. Which is logical, but also very limited in view and perspective. I thought this was very interesting.

I have been invited to speak at the upcoming Intilaaqah event at SQU this Thursday. Intilaaqah is an initiative by Shell that aims to provide free counseling and training for new local businesses and entrepreneurs. The suggestion title of my a presentation is “unleash your potential, talking about utilizing the knowledge and skills you have to make something productive” – but I think that I will be mainly speaking about how to use up your free time to do something productive.

(Ken Adams with my colleague Mohd Al Balushi)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a reader of the awesome blog on Contract Drafting by Ken Adams, author of my all time favourite book on the same topic “A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting” (I also mentioned the book here). Well, guess what, with the help of the American Bar Association we managed to arrange for him to come to Oman to conduct a workshop exclusive for the Contracts Dept of MOLA (6 people including yours truly)! You people cannot image how cool it is for the author of one of your favourite books to come to your country and do you a training session! The event lasted for two days and we all loved it!

Highlights of the event:
1- I got my book signed!

2- We had a private test release of the latest products of the Ministry of Legal Affairs : MOLA CUPCAKES.

I will be attending a 10-day training programme in Jordan right after Eid. The event is organised by the investment section of the Islamic Development Bank organisation and the United Nations’ UNCTAD. The program will cover international investment agreements and dispute settlement issues related to them (mostly arbitration).

One of our duties at MOLA is to review investment agreements that government goes into, and one of my colleagues at work is part of the negotiating committee that is responsible for bilateral investment agreements with other countries, so this should be very interesting. I am required to submit a 2-3 page brief on the BIT format Oman uses, which I found, but did not manage to examine properly yet. I am supposed to submit this within five days, I will try to do it tomorrow.

The program is going to be pretty extensive, 9am to 6pm daily with one day off through-out, so I am not sure how much sightseeing I will be able to do, but it is always nice to have a break from work every now and then.

Will keep up you updated on how this goes.

Today’s session was again on the subject of the online investigation of child porn crimes. The session was not technically focused the way the first day was, this one instead discussed the criminal process of child molestation, its psychology, proactive measures taken by the police, decoys, interrogating suspects for evidence and descriptions of previous cases and their results.

The historical development and the psychological aspects of the child pornography industry were very interesting. Before the advent of the Internet, child porn was only existent in the US through magazines personally shared between people with such preference that have brought those magazines with them from European countries with less restrictive regulation. The Internet made it possible to have child porn readily accessible from all around the world and contributed in normalising this conduct as child molesters could see and communicate with others with the same sexual preference. It is worth mentioning that not only distributing child porn is illegal in the US, but merely having or accessing child porn on the web is also illegal in the US.

The majority of the session today was spent on the investigations of child molestation cases, techniques used by molesters to victimise children, the different types of child molesters, statistics and examples on patterns and efforts made by the molesters in the process, methods used by the police to set up traps to convict suspects, techniques used for data collection, and other stuff as well.

Many of the examples described today were extremely disturbing, but the session as a whole was very interesting. Yet still I couldn’t help it but feel that I was just wasting my time, I did not learn anything significant that I could relate to. I am glad that the whole session on child pornography is now over, I had really heard enough porn terms and keywords that could last me a lifetime. The rest of the workshop shall cover money laundering over the Internet, funding terrorism, a technical guide on the Internet and computers, and public/private partnerships and cooperation.