Hi all,
This is Khairi, Abdulateef (or Khairy, Abdul latif as you knew me from my old Blogs). As some of you know me, I am from Baghdad-Iraq. I am a university professor in Al-Mustansiriyah in Baghdad, & I am now at Simmons College for my PhD studies (along with my colleague Falah).
I?d like to tell you here about our long trip from Baghdad to Boston, but you know what, that will be a long Blog, so, I`ll try to do it in three different Blogs. The 1st will be about our suffering in Baghdad, the 2nd will be about the long trip, & the 3rd will be about what happened after we came here to Simmons College. This will be my 1st Blog.
I think that almost all of you are aware about what happens in Iraq & Baghdad, & I have written about it before. However, for this trip, I think that we faced more problems. One of the least helpful things was the non-cooperation from some of our employers in our university, so, it has taken a very long time just to finish some regular routine
papers. We should have started our 1st PhD semester course here in Simmons College in September, but, because of these difficulties, we were stuck with this paperwork for more than 1.5 months later, even when we had started these procedures from the end of June.
The people here at Simmons were very worried about us, & we were very worried that we might lose this great opportunity, which might came once in the life time for somebody in our circumstances. In the same time, we were very eager to get this opportunity, & because we are the 1st Iraqi people that join the Simmons College, & the 1st ones who will get the PhD in LIS from the USA (& maybe any other places out of Iraq as far as we know). So, you can imagine how eager we were to take this great opportunity.
After all that suffering, we got some of the papers that we needed. Then, we needed some other regular routine papers in the University, & another one from the Higher Education ministry. When we were in the University, someone there advised us to contact the college that we were accepted in (Simmons College) & ask them to send us another acceptance paper containing some new wording on it because there is a new routine set of instructions that might make us start over from the beginning. So, we took his good advice & asked the great people at Simmons to help us again by sending the new acceptance papers. In a very short time, the rescue came by the great people at Simmons College, & we finished our papers in the University.
Now, we started to have some other bad luck. Fortunately for our best luck, we found a good friend there to help us in Dr. Zainab A. Al-Wa`aly. (Dr. Zainab was in the 1st & 2nd Iraqi groups in the training courses held by Simmons College in Jordan & UAE). So, she was very very helpful to us, & she let us know whatever we had to do exactly to finish all the paperwork in the best time. She did whatever she could just to help us finish & get to Simmons, & she is the one that we will be grateful for her forever!
After all these troubles in Iraq, we had some visas problems, which was due to the timing & other things. One of the problems was because we had to go to Amman in Jordan to get a visa. You can not get a visa to the USA in Iraq. That requires an early appointment, & some other things such as getting to Amman, which was a little difficult, too.
Finally, we have got the visas, which were sent in our Passports in the (ARAMEX) fast mail (some thing like FedEx that you have). We started to get ready to come here after we finished other small paperworks in our College.
To be continued?
Yours,
Khairi, Abdulateef