Omar

This is the part of the journey I had long planned: to visit my great friend and colleague from Abu Dhabi now living in Tracy, California. Omar had previously worked at Sheikh Khalifa Medical City as a clinician and married and was now living in California when I first met him. He linked up on LinkedIn and when I saw that he had worked on informatics and the electronic health record I thought perhaps I could get this guy to come back and work for me as a physician Informaticist. But first, I asked the chief medical officer of SKMC, Dr. Abdulmajid, about his opinion of Omar. The response was immediate! He's excellent! That was true, then, and is true today!

Omar is the smartest, wisest, most innovative, and talented Informaticist I have met, myself included. I spoke with Omar on the phone, and his sincere, understated, and kind approach to life and work was immediately apparent. I hired Omar, and he joined me at Abu Dhabi Health Services; SEHA, to help level up our informatics team. He was very organized, knew how to use SharePoint to track order sets, and Clinical Decision Support rules, was facile with pivot tables, understood how to get things done and thus was a key to many successes experienced there.

Part of this trip is to make connections with important people in my life. Omar was on the list from the beginning. I drove to Del Via regional Park and set up camp. Omar brought two of his daughters, Nuha and Rania, seventh and fifth graders respectively. They had never been camping before and we decided to let them experience camping but they could go home to their beds 45 minutes away. The girls were pretty shy, and unfortunately, Joyce is not here with us because she would've immediately engaged them in some fun things in her unique way.

We started off with lunch, listening to some of the birds nearby and an annoying ground squirrel. I was hoping to use the kayak on the water, but it didn't pass inspection because it was still wet from the previous trip, so we went to the boat docks to see about renting Unfortunately none were available. But the girls were enthusiastic about going fishing. They had never done that before.

So we went back to the camp, grabbed the fishing tackle, then off to the west beach with fishing tackle in hand. They quickly caught on to casting both bait, and lures. Nuha did get a tug, but the fish were lucky today, and we didn't catch any!

Back to the camp, where Omar's special Middle Eastern chicken for kebabs was marinating. We started a fire with Rania lighting it. The kebabs were amazing. They were served with special Afghan bread brought from the market. We sang some songs and tried to coax Nuha into also playing and singing, but didn't get very far with that! Turns down, she already knew "Country Roads!"

Of course we finished with s'mores s'mores and s'mores!