A place to belong: Oman, me, and the misperceivers

“Mark my words; she is going to stay and settle down there,” my mother told her best friend after I simply texted her that I had just arrived safely in Muscat. It was my first visit to Oman, twenty-one years ago, in September. I tried to walk down the steps from the plane onto the tarmac at the old Seeb International Airport, clumsily juggling a BlackBerry, a notebook, and a suitcase. The weather was hot, humid and sticky, yet signalling both lingering summer heat and the approach of cooler days.

I cannot recall the exact words I sent in that moment from that old phone to my mum, but it was probably something like, “First impression: I feel like a fish in water.” Intuitive as always, my mother had long recognised that I had never found a very easy sense of belonging in the Netherlands, despite it being my ‘country of origin.’

My first visit to traditional yet unpretentious Oman back then lasted just six months, for a brief but life-changing internship. The country came to hold a special place in my heart, mostly because of its natural beauty, gentle and peace-loving people, while inspiring me to become a better version of myself. I remember driving around in a rental car, a tape playing in the recorder, and suddenly imagining what it would be like to serve the nation. These days, some might call such strong thoughts ‘manifesting', while others would perhaps call it ‘maktoob.’

Years later, my mum’s intuition proved right. Driven by my longing for Oman, I came back in 2008 to write a feature about the country and never really returned to reside in the Netherlands since. I initially had no job prospects and no place of my own to stay, staying for a while with a kind Dutch couple in Muscat. A year later, I found myself both writing features for this newspaper and serving the Omani people by working for the government, while I also met my then future husband, sipping Kahwa and chai with his mother and other relatives.

Indeed, I have always felt at home in Oman, only occasionally as the odd one out. My husband has even always been a bit jealous that I loved his country before I loved him.

Me feeling like a fish in the water in Oman is also why I was disappointed to recently read in notes sent to my father by two people close to him, and long after my mother had passed, that “I had moved here because I needed clear boundaries.” Making me feel like a floating fish, one of them even wrote that “it was ironic that I had risen to the surface in a country like this.” Their wrong assumptions revealed a deep misunderstanding not just of me but also of women’s rights in this great nation, presumably because they had never set foot here.

Their words were an insult not just to me, but also to those who paved the way for people in this nation. Just look around you; it is hard to imagine that just 55 years ago, there were only three schools, no higher education institutions, no proper healthcare system and no diversified economy.

So many strong Omani women returned to Oman from abroad in the early seventies, when the late His Majesty Sultan Qaboos acceded to the throne. Among them were my mother-in-law, an entrepreneur, and my former boss, who would become Minister of Higher Education and one of the nation’s most influential civil servants.

My mother-in-law came back to Oman during the early days of rapid change and development in the nation. There were still no proper roads, and she had to walk long distances to fetch water, stand in a long queue just to call her mother in Kenya using a pay phone, and often cried during these calls as she missed her children. Though it was hard, her mother kept these conversations very short.

Years later, my mother-in-law came to understand that this was an act of tough love of her mum, made in the hope of her daughter building a better life for herself and her kids in Oman, a vision initiated by the late His Majesty Sultan Qaboos and now continued by His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik.

My husband’s mum started working for a ministry, and when that did not work out, she launched a company from a single room in her small flat using an old-fashioned phone. She had no prior knowledge of the products she wanted to sell, but she had a talent for business, and in the end, she became successful.

I guess I am so lucky to be able to immerse myself into a culture so different from my own that opened my eyes to a new way of seeing the world. It is another reason why I love, or as I say, ana oheb, Oman.