Abstract
Change is in the air, from the villages to the city centers society is shifting in a convoluted side-winding but forward facing direction to re-energize ancient and pragmatic cultures poised to step into the 21st century global arenas more thoroughly than ever before. Engaging discourse regarding practices and policies for persons with disabilities leapt across the podium at the Rehabilitation Internationals Arab Conference in Bahrain 2005, exhilaration and somberness could be seen in the faces of the university students who were involved in a project aiming to reduce the segregation of children and youth with special abilities and needs and their healthy peers in Oman in 2006, and in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 2009 a call was sent out to bring awareness to the public of life stream needs for persons with disabilities. The aims of this project were: to condense an overview of general policy implementation of the UN’s CRPD and local policies in Oman; to describe some of the challenges of children/youth with special abilities and needs in the Gulf; and to outline the beliefs and reactions of university students engaged in the first training program for social workers offered by a private university in the rural south of Oman. The information which was available primarily in Arabic was collected, translated, and made accessible to the larger scientific community. The call for development in the special needs sector identified gives reason to refocus attention on the improvement of available services, including the establishment of an effective monitoring system along with adequate training programs for university students and healthcare providers. The project revealed, moreover, that awareness of the rights of disadvantaged children, youth, and adults should be improved in order to counter stigma- related discrimination and to assure access of people to special needs services.