alhamdolillahi Rabbil-aalameen

monday 11:30 am Jeddah

alhamdolillahi Rabbil-aalameen. today i visited the two private medical schools in Jeddah.

one is about 3 years old and has an age bias that is expressly in the college rules and regulations: no students who are more than 5 years out of high school, and only in a few cases an exception for students 7 years out.

the other has no age bias and is only one year old. as i am an attorney in the US, the reception here was much better. but it goes beyond the age cutoff -- at this school i was expressly told that my law background and experience are assets that make me an appealing candidate.

at the first school, i was told that there was a strong desire to keep students of similar ages and interests -- so experience was literally a liability.

three incidental notes: getting things done in Jeddah is definitely much easier in the morning than in the afternoon. also, Jeddah's shopping malls are so numerous they only "lag behind" Dubai's in sheer ostentation (no artificial ski slopes here that i know of).

finally, the high point of my visit to the first school was making the acquaintance of a young Saudi applicant whose family home in Makkah is just some 100 meters from the Haram! and has been in their family some 100 years, alhamdolillah, passed down for at least 3 generations.

can you imagine the barakat for that family head who settled his family near the Haram? now think about the awesome reward of Ibrahim alayhis salam, who brought his family to this valley at the Command of Allah, an event that founded the holy city.