Hello everyone,
Thank you, Cheryl, for opening this thread. I have been composing this post in my head for a long time, somewhere between the school run and bedtime, between a pot of dal on the stove and a video call back home to Colombo. I am a Sri Lankan father, living in Muscat for the past four and a half years, raising two boys in this beautiful, quietly generous country. And the most honest thing I can tell you is this. Oman has not just shaped my children. It has reshaped me.
Before I speak about my boys, I need to speak about my parents. I grew up in Sri Lanka, raised by two people who gave everything without naming it as sacrifice. The curfews, the structure, the insistence on respect, the meals eaten together, the lessons that felt like rules and turned out to be gifts. I didn't truly understand any of it until I became a father myself. Now, watching my sons grow up far from the country we came from, I feel my parents' love in a way I never did as a child. I understand now how hard it must have been. To hold children steady in a world that pulls in every direction. To plant values you hope will survive the distance. Umma, Dad. I see you now. I see everything.
My sons attend Indian School Al Mabailah, and I want to say something about that school that I don't think gets said enough. It is not just a place of learning. it is a place of belonging. For expat families like ours, a school is the first anchor in a new country. It is where your child either finds their footing or loses it. At Al Mabailah, my boys found their footing. The environment carries a seriousness about education that feels familiar to us, rooted in the same South Asian belief that my own parents raised me with that knowledge is the one thing no circumstance can take from you. The teachers hold the children with care and with discipline in equal measure, and the community of families around the school is one of the most quietly supportive things I have found in Muscat. Children from so many backgrounds, sitting in the same classroom, doing the same homework, sharing the same canteen.聽 it teaches something that no textbook can. It teaches children that they are not the centre of the world, and that is not a loss. That is one of the finest lessons a childhood can carry.
What has always given me peace is the journey between that school and our home. Muscat is one of the safest cities I have ever known, and I say this not as someone who has simply been lucky, but as someone who has watched it over four and a half years with a father's eyes. which are the most watchful eyes there are. The streets are orderly. The people are measured. There is a sense of civic calm here that I did not expect when we first arrived, and that I now count among the most precious things this country has given my family. My sons move through this city with a confidence I would not have dared give them so young, because the city itself has earned that confidence. Safety is not just the absence of danger. it is the presence of a culture that values human dignity. And Oman has that in abundance.
That dignity shows up in ways that stopped me entirely the first time I witnessed them. I was at a mall, waiting for a lift, when I noticed a woman step inside alone. A man approached, saw her there, and simply paused at the door. He did not push through. He did not assume. He waited. quietly, without performance. until she acknowledged him and made space. The doors had not even closed, and already I was thinking about my boys. That one moment, that one pause, said more about the character of a man than any lecture could. In Omani culture, a woman's space is her space. You do not enter it without her welcome. I stood there thinking聽 this is what I want my sons to carry into the world. Not just politeness trained into them at home, but a genuine, instinctive awareness that other people's comfort matters. The kind of man who pauses at a door. The kind of man who waits.
This is what I mean when I say Oman is teaching my children things I could not have taught them alone. The respect embedded in this culture聽 for women, for elders, for strangers, for the shared space between people is lived, not lectured. My boys absorb it because they are surrounded by it. They see it in how their Omani classmates speak to teachers. They see it in how people greet one another, with a fullness and a sincerity that slows you down in the best way. They hear it in the adhan that marks the day with rhythm and reminds everyone, believer or not, that there is something larger than the rush of ordinary hours.
We are Sri Lankan at our core聽 the food, the festivals, the language we speak inside our home, the video calls every Sunday to grandparents who cannot hold my boys but love them across seven hours of time difference. That does not change. But what is being added to my sons here is something I am deeply grateful for. They are learning that respect is not weakness. That making space for someone else does not diminish your own space. That a country can be orderly without being cold, structured without being rigid, proud of its identity without being closed to yours.
I mixed cultures with them every single day. Pol sambol on a Friday and hummus on a Tuesday. Sri Lankan national anthem before bed and Arabic with the security guard downstairs. We sent greeting on Sinhala and Tamil new Year聽 and we eat dates during Ramadan out of solidarity with friends who fast. My children are growing up knowing that the world is wide and that their place in it is not threatened by learning to honour someone else's.
The hardest part of raising children abroad is always the distance from those who loved you first. My mother has never seen my younger son play cricket in the courtyard. My father has never heard my older boy read aloud in Tamil, which he is learning now and doing beautifully. That ache does not go away. But what I carry back to them, what I will carry back eventually, are two boys who have been shaped by more than one country's goodness. Boys who know how to wait at a door. Boys who understand that kindness is not accidental it is chosen, again and again, in small and ordinary moments.
Oman did not have to be generous to us. But it has been. And for that, this Sri Lankan father, still learning, still grateful, is quietly and profoundly thankful.
With love from Muscat,
Fazmin Shahabdeen
A Sri Lankan Thatha (Father)
馃愤1 member reacted to this post
|
|
