By Nouha MaaninouKenitra, Morocco
When RecrearApply finally kicked off in Morocco, all I did was worry. It was 11.30am and only five people were present. We had worked hard and we were expecting more people: 55 students were signed up. Kamya, another Recrear staff member, had come all the way from Granada to help out with the workshop. I started wondering if having such a project in the Ibn Tofail University was a good idea in the first place. After two hours of wondering and stressing out, I finally saw 25 people entering our conference room. It felt good but was it really all about numbers?
During the next sessions we saw many other people coming into our workshop space, to ask questions or take advice. Sometimes they really had something to ask, but other times they just wanted to know what was going on in classroom #10.
What really flattered us was the group of Moroccans and Mauritanian students that attended our sessions regularly and on time. They were a group of more or less 10 people who were very interested in knowing as much as possible about studying in the United States.We spent three days, five sessions, with those amazing people. During this time, Recrear’s Kamya Raja and our guest Bettina Jones shared all their knowledge about how to apply for North American universities. All the while, they also experienced some pure intercultural moments with our participants: Hamza, Khaoula, Soufiane, Marouane, Mariem, Mohamed B, Mohamed H, Fatima Zahra, Yasmine, Ahmed.
At the end of our last session and after taking a group photo, those students thanked us and that was by far my favorite moment of the project: the moment in which we finally realized that our mission as Recrear staff and project coordinators had been rightly and fully accomplished.
I believe I do not know much about development, but this project helped me come up with my own definition: development is not about reaching the biggest amount of people but it’s about reaching the right ones, the ones that have the willingness to learn and to share their knowledge with others around them.
I wish you all a good week.
تحياتي مع
Nouha
