Today we heard from Farah and her talk genuinely stuck with me in a way I was not fully expecting. What I appreciated most about it was how honest she was about her path, because it was not the straight line that success stories usually get packaged as. She had the grades to go into something like tech or science but she chose to study language instead, which she mentioned is typically seen as the path for students who did not do well academically. And instead of letting that perception define her she built something meaningful out of it. Her entrepreneurial success came from wanting to fix something that personally frustrated her, which was the experience of learning Arabic as someone who was not native to it, and realizing that the language was being treated as inferior even by the people it belonged to. She wanted to create access to Arabic for everyone, both foreigners trying to learn it and Moroccans trying to reconnect with it, and that desire to change something real is what drove everything she built. It made me think about how the best ideas do not always come from the most conventional starting points, and that choosing the unexpected path is not the same as choosing the wrong one.
Going into the entrepreneurship exercise after that talk felt really fitting because we were basically asked to do a smaller version of exactly what Farah described, find a real problem and build something around it. Our team worked really well together and what surprised me was how quickly we found common ground. We went through some guiding questions and kept landing on the same issues that are just as relevant in America as they are in Morocco, things like transportation, accessibility, and affordable housing. We ended up choosing affordable and accessible housing for university students as our idea and honestly it was not a hard sell for anyone in the group because we are all university students who are very much living that reality. There is something kind of funny but also kind of telling about the fact that you put students from different countries in a room together and within minutes we are all bonding over being broke and not being able to afford rent. The structural problems that affect young people are apparently not that different no matter where you are in the world, and I think that was the biggest surprise and the best part of the whole exercise.
After a short day of class Aanya came over to my host family’s house and got invited to eat couscous with us, which honestly is the most wholesome thing that could have happened on a chill Sunday. We ended the evening heading to the market to do a little more shopping and I have to talk about what happened because I am still proud of myself. I had my eye on a leather jacket and the vendor was sitting firm at 800 dirhams and was not budging no matter what I said. So I pulled out all the cash I had left, looked him dead in the eye, and told him this is all I have. And he caved. 670 dirhams. Leather jacket. Mine. I think Farah’s talk about going after what you want and not accepting the first answer really sunk in faster than expected.
