Today was a lot of fun and very exciting! We started off the day with a lesson from Farrah, the founder of the Cross Cultural Center for Learning. Her story was impactful, had ups and downs, and she showcased her determined spirit. Farrah explaoned to us how seh started her business idea through the prcoess of discovering herself, and being unhappy with how Moroccan culture was hidden in some regions of the country. She found a problem that bother her and felt like she could amke and impactful solution, and that is how the CCCL came to life.

One of the biggest lessons I took from her talk was realizing that unexpected turns in life can lead to something meaningful. She explained that she never truly viewed anything in her life as a failure, which changed how I viewed the entrepreneurship activity we did with the Moroccan university students. During the exercise, my group spent a lot of time brainstorming instead of choosing one clear idea, which just showed how many different problems and potential solutions we can all come up with. Along with that, there were slight disagreements in our ideas about whether we all thought one could be efficient. Normally, small setbacks like these would have made me lose motivation, but Farah’s perspective encouraged me to stay open to the process. In the end, all our brainstorming led us to our final creative idea: Catsbah, a cat adoption shelter.

Overall, our team worked well together despite a challenge here and there. I was surprised by how similarly we all thought when discussing issues we observed in Morocco, but even more surprised that my classmates from Pitt initially identified more problems than the local students. One of the university students later shared a brainstorming method from his entrepreneurship class, suggesting we look through photos we had taken around Morocco to spark ideas for problems that needed solutions. As a visual learner, I was surprised I had never considered using this technique before. Once we finally agreed on an idea, everything came together quickly, and we developed our plans for Catsbah in less than fifteen minutes. I really enjoyed working with the students and seeing how both our similarities and differences strengthened the experience.

I think this was such a fun activity to do and we even got a new diverse aspect to it, and it is something I will never forget!