Coming to you back from Rabat today! It’s weird being back. I still feel uncertain and uncomfortable, but less so than before. My walk from my host family to CCCL is becoming more familiar (though I still have Apple Maps open every time!) and I have been able to talk more with my host sister which has been nice. Today, we had a session with Farrah (the founder of CCCL) who talked about her entrepreneurial journey and then got to do an activity with some Moroccan students!
For English not being her native language, every time Farrah has come and talked to us, I have found myself feeling very engaged and inspired. Farrah explained how from a very young age she found herself having an identity crisis, going to a French public school that didn’t teach her much about Arabic or the Moroccan culture (despite going to school in Morocco!). This taught her the importance of valuing different cultures, which Farrah has brought into the CCCL and is what I tried to do today during the cross-cultural team exercise. Our task was to create a product that solved a problem, and my group decided to create water bottle/straw that could purify water and track how much a person drank each day. This was in response to a problem everyone in my group (including the Moroccan students) faced: easy access to clean drinking water in Morocco and staying hydrated. Each morning, I have to wait till I get to CCCL to fill up my water bottle from their bottle filling station or pay for bottled water in the medina. Throughout the activity, I had made sure to ask the Moroccan students about their experiences accessing clean drinking water so that we would create a solution that worked better for all of us. I learned that even though they might be okay drinking the tap water in Rabat (where they live), sometimes water in other Moroccan cities is not okay for them to drink.
Farah also explained that one of the first signs of becoming an entrepreneur (according to her) was having a desire to fix something. This is largely why my group decided to create our own water bottle/straw because we wanted to solve our own problem of having difficulty accessing clean drinking water every day. As I was talking with my group during the activity, at some points someone would mention another company doing a similar thing (like LifeStraw, Brita, or Apple). I remembered Farrah saying how competition can be great because it forces you to innovate and tried to incorporate this into my group. I (or maybe someone else in my group, I can’t remember now) suggested that instead of entirely creating our own technology for the water bottle/straw we could do a partnership with Apple, utilizing their Health app technology to track information on how much water a person drinks a day.
Overall, I really enjoyed the cross-cultural activity (much more than I thought I would!). Everyone in my group was very engaged and interested in creating the best product we could. It felt very collaborative and I really enjoyed developing something that felt meaningful and impactful (and that I would want to use in the future!). As we were talking about our water bottle design one of the Moroccan students mentioned a wearable water bottle design they saw on Instagram, where the water bottle label peels off and turns into a strap. It was so exciting because I had also seen a video about it on my TikTok a few weeks ago! This might have might favorite part of the activity because it was another reminder of how small of a world it really is!
After both sessions I had a nice lunch with my host sister and then enjoyed exploring more of the in and around the medina. I find Farrah’s self-assurance and pride in all she has accomplished very encouraging, and another reminder to continue putting myself first and believe in myself.
Good night!