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.