Cross-cultural learning was the focus of today’s main lecture, led by Farah, the founder of and brains behind the CCCL. She discussed her story that led to her creating the organization, a story that was full of twists and turns. My biggest takeaway from her talk was that the numerous pivots in her life actually led her to create something amazing, so I need to embrace the challenges and failures I face in the future rather than view it as a stopping point. She also heavily emphasized that she didn’t truly believe that anything in her life was a failure, a value that influenced my participation in the entrepreneurship exercise. My group and I spent a large amount of time brainstorming rather than focusing on developing one idea, a path I didn’t initially agree with. One of our university student members also shot down a number of our ideas, making me discouraged about whether we would ever get to focus on one business idea. While not a concrete “failure”, these small setbacks may have normally made me annoyed and unmotivated to put effort into the activity. However, Farah’s insistence that nothing was a true failure encouraged me to embrace our team’s challenges. While I was initially bothered by how much time we spent brainstorming, it eventually led us to our genius cat adoption shelter, Catsbah!
Our team dynamics were strong overall, despite a few small challenges. I was surprised to see how similarly we all thought when it came to thinking about challenges faced in Morocco, but I was even more surprised to see that my classmates from Pitt noticed more issues that needed solving rather than the students who actually live here. We came up with many problems that we observed during our time here, but the students struggled to replicate a similar level of ideas at first. As I mentioned before, we faced some brainstorming challenges and regarding our team agreeing upon an idea. Despite this, one of the university students who was unhappy with our idea for Catsbah shared a unique technique used in one of his entrepreneurship courses to brainstorm ideas. The idea was to look at images we took of Morocco and around the places we visited to look for things that could be attached to potential problems that needed solutions. I was shocked to think I had never thought of this kind of technique to brainstorm ideas, especially because I am a very visual learner. Ultimately, our challenges as a group were minimal once it came to developing our business idea. We all began spitting out numerous ideas and plans for Catsbah, and the project came together in less than 15 minutes after we spent ages brainstorming! I truly loved getting to work with the students and observing how similar our knowledge is and how some differences actually brought us all together.
After the activity, I spent the next few hours shopping with my host sisters. I bought pounds of gifts and goodies that I don’t have space for in my suitcase! Looks like I’ll need to buy another luggage tomorrow. We were exhausted from shopping and got some delicious crepes and milkshakes by the beach after, and we enjoyed watching the sun set as we sipped our piña coladas and chatted. I even got to try on one of my sisters’ traditional Moroccan dresses! I learned so much more about my sisters and their lives today, and I really enjoy getting to know them more and more by the day. I hope we can stay in touch after this trip!
