Please visit this website for details on our family excursion in Panama:
http://www.freewebs.com/panamakidz/

Our temporary office in Panama is all set up. Phone and internet are go. Call the office in Maine, and the phone rings here, and if I'm not in the office, your message can be converted to an email and sent to me where ever I may be.

This is going to be a very busy few weeks - with preparations for our two upcoming meetings. Instead of having one large conference this winter, we are having two meetings - a focused workshop on digital libraries in Morocco for about 75 people and the annual conference in Panama for about 150 people.

The Morocco workshop is nearly settled. The attendees are registered, papers have been submitted papers, we know the speakers, the sponsors are set, and our partners in Morocco have organized the food and hotel.

The Panama conference still has some work to be done. I am meeting with the hotels on Wednesday to review the status for food, accommodations and meeting rooms. Registrations are coming in, and we are filling the panels with interesting speakers and the poster session with some fascinating research.

It is a new year - today I was working on the 4th Annual Report of the Fulbright Academy and also reviewed the reports from previous years. Our income has risen steadily - from under $20,000/year in 2003 and 2004 to nearly $100,000 in 2006, with over $50,000 in cash and in-kind services already committed for 2007.

We are hoping to double our income again in 2007, with new programs and initiatives. Some of these programs will be the result of work and research conducted by our 2006 fellows/interns. We supported seven young Fulbrighters and scientists, and some of their work is providing benefits to FAST. For example, one Fulbrighter in the field of communication was seeking a film project and produced a DVD about our 2006 conference. Another wanted to connect with other Fulbrighters in her field, and by working with FAST, we were able to quickly establish a network that benefited her and us. We are very grateful to Booz Allen Hamilton for sponsoring the Fall fellows/interns.

In looking at the old annual reports, I remembered some of the trips from these past four years, such as the International Fulbright Conference in Athens, Greece late in 2004 - at the time of my 40th birthday. That meeting provided the personal contacts that launched a series of international programs. Our Berlin conference earlier this year, the Morocco workshop later this month and the Panama conference in March all grew out of contacts that were made in Athens.

I am especially grateful to certain Fulbright families in Washington, Baltimore, Cold Spring Harbor Winston-Salem, St. Louis, Lincoln, Paris, Berlin, Leuven, Rabat and Panama City. These Fulbrighters hosted me in their homes and communities while I was visiting their fine cities during the past two years. I am looking forward to establishing contacts with other members and colleagues in the 12 months to come.

It was a great Christmas - with emails of personal greetings from Fulbright alumni in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe and the US. One came from a Muslim colleague in North Africa - "I was so busy with our Lamb sacrifice Aïd preparation (this coming Saturday) that I completely forgot to wish you happy Christmas and a prosperous new 2007 year."

The best email, however, came two days before Christmas - notification that the Academy had been awarded a $10,000 grant to support participation by about fifteen Fulbrighters in Latin America - each person will get up to $600 to pay for their registration and their accommodations in Panama City. The Fulbright Commission in Mexico has nominated six people, and some Fulbrighters from other countries have been identified as well. A call for nominations is going out again next week. We have been seeking funds from other sources as well, and are hopeful that we will be successful in matching the $10,000 from SENACYT.

The other good news is that the Academy will have an office at ANCON (la Asociación Nacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza - the National Association for the Conservation of Nature) during the time that we are based in Panama. Moving day is Thursday, January 4, and all systems are go.

Dozens of poeple have registered or submitted abstracts for the Panama conference. It is an international group, with experience in places such as Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Nicaragua, Palestine, Panama, Pakistan, Singapore, Ukraine, UK and USA.

On Friday, I compared with list with the attendee list from our 2006 conference in Berlin. 140 people were registered to attend that meeting -- and 19 of them are expected to come to the 2007 conference in Panama. I am quite pleased with that statistic, given that the meeting is (1) in a different continent and (2) that many of the 2006 participants were student grantees.

In addition to registrations, we are getting confirmations on the tours. The three-hour tours are on Friday and Saturday morning. One group will be going to Culebra, an environnmental education center on the waterfront managed by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Another group will be going to the Pamana Canal. Two or three additional tours are still in the development stages - the exact number of tours will depend on the number of conference participants.

Here is a picture from the window of the apartment that we have rented in Panama City. We are on the 9th floor. Palm trees, parks, hills in the distance.

I took some time off from Blogging on this account - three months.

Many developments at the Fulbright Academy - new institutional members, travel and programs in Washington and Winston-Salem, updates on our workshops and conference.

I am particularly excited about the upcoming workshop in Morocco on Digital Libraries and their application to science, education and cultural preservation. We will have around 75 people from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Egypt, Canada, France, the UK and the United States. US participants coming from the Library of Congress, the Getty Museum, the State Department, Harvard, Tufts, the University of Chicago, etc. It will also be our first multi-lingual program with simultaneous translation. I am very grateful to the Moroccan Fulbrighters who approached us and asked us to help facilitate the meeting and manage the US delegation.

The preparations for the Conference in Panama are going well - that is about 11 weeks away, and we have a good set of speakers and presenters. We are still working on sponsors. There will be 100-150 participants - maybe more - it depends on how many Panamanians want to attend. The upper limit will be 150. I found a fun video this morning - time-lapse photography showing boats going through the Panama Canal - I put it on our homepage.

My wife and two of the kids fly to Panama in three weeks, I follow two days later with our oldest. We will be in Panama for 12 weeks - organizing the conference and developing stronger relationships with Latin American institutions. Our apartment is in the center of the city, near the University, so it will be a big change from our suburban existence here in South Portland, Maine. Climate. Language. Culture. Environment.

Some weeks are very slow - nothing seems to progress. In others, there is immediate movement. The first three days of this week make it a week in the second category.

Message on Monday morning when I turn on the computer: a $200 donation from a prospective board member. Earlier this year, we announced in the newsletter that we were seeking candidates to serve on the board of directors. In the past 18 months, we added two new members and one resigned. Now we need some more new blood - ideally three this year and three next year. We started with over a dozen candidates, and so it will quite difficult to decide on the three - criteria include professional background, academic background, nationality, past experience on non-profit boards, gaps in our current capabilities, and willingness to serve.

Those who don't get on this year might serve in other capacities - such as on our newly created Advisory Board or on a study committee. Unfortunately we are still a small organization, and we can only manage a limited number of projects and volunteers - even volunteers need some management and oversight.

The other nice development has been progress with the Panama Conference. We seem to be all set with our two venues: El Panama and the Gamboa Resort. Our opening speakers are Sir Federico Humbert (Panama's Ambassador to the US) and Sir Harold Kroto (Nobel Prize in Chemistry). The Fulbright Commission in Mexico has recommended five possible speakers or participants. A leader in the Fulbright Alumni Group in Morocco faxed his proposed topic for a poster in the poster session. The Fulbright Alumni Group for Palestine seems to have identified funding to send 3-4 people. And we received a response from one of the alumni groups in Asia which hopes to host our March 2008 conference - they also plan on sending a 3-4 person delegation to Panama.

Institutional memberships are also growing. The newest is Sixth Star Marketing & Entertainment. They provide speakers to tourist & cruise ships around the world. Many Fulbrighters are qualified speakers, and some have work schedules that would allow them to take a 1-2 week cruise and give lectures to the guests on their specialty - be it natural science, social history, or any number of other topics. We are hoping that their involvement will help some of our indivual members, and at the same time help this institutional member.

The news from last week relates to an upcoming trip to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I will be at Salem College and Wake Forest University - we will be talking about the Fulbright program, the Fulbright Academy, and opportunities for individuals and institutions to be involved in both. For me, however, it will also be a personal journey. My grandmother's parents moved to WS in the 1890s - brought there to work for Mr. Reynolds of Reynolds Tobacco Company. My grandmother grew up there, graduated from Salem College in 1917. Two of her brothers and her parents are buried in Winston-Salem, so I will visit their graves.

So it has been a busy few days.