May the kids of Tarmilat smile :)

Since the beginning of the school year, I was unsure about what to choose for my senior project. However, I soon figured out that I wanted something related to community service. I thought of conducting a blood drive but I did not get enough support from the hospitals around here. That is mainly because they all thought I was not serious about it since I was still a minor. Therefore, I decided to think of something else. Fortunately, Mrs. Eddouks organized a 3 days trip to Azrou to help us clear minds. During these days, she gave us some questions that we had to think of for a while then answer them honestly. Through these questions, I was sure that my goal is to do community service and decided to help a group of people in need. A lot of my other classmates shared the same goal with me. With the previous experience of some of my classmates, we found the group of people we wanted to help. This group is the students of the school of Tarmilat. After that, we decided to visit them to communicate with them and let them inform us of their needs. We made sure that our way of approaching them is not “Hey, we’re here to help you” but is “Hey, we want to be friends with you and try as a whole to make your school environment better”. On the 23rd of November, we visited the school and the director also came and stayed with us. He first took us to a house near the school. The owners, who were very nice, informed us about their perspective of the school as parents of 2 students. After that, we finally got the chance to enter the school and meet the students in person. We shared some snacks with them and played several games like soccer and "I paint you sing". We learned that they are about 18 students from 1st to 6th grade. Their school had only one classroom and lacked a lot of necessities like water, electricity, good heating, bathrooms, and windows. It was unbelievable for us that these children are only 10 minutes away from us and still we have such different lives. My team and I decided to provide them with all the previous necessities, some teaching material, a library, and build another classroom. We started working on the project and organized a lot of events to collect some money. We were also willing to get sponsors to help our project become reality. However, we could not send any email to the sponsors because we needed pictures of the school that we were unable to take unless some papers were fixed. Getting these papers was not as simple as we expected it to be. We are still working on these papers which we are hoping to get in around a week. While working on this project, we were met with a lot of obstacles. The first one was the unity of the team.

As we progressed with the project, some students worked really fast while others were not as fast. This created a lot of tensions within the group and, thus, the project was slowed down. We are still dealing with these tensions and are trying to overcome them as soon as possible by communicating. The second obstacle is that we had high hopes and ended up choosing some goals that now appear unrealistic. These goals are building another classroom and digging a well. They are not achievable because the land where the school is built on is not owned by a specific person and, therefore, it is illegal for us to work on it. Also, the building and digging require a large budget that we can not get just by the events we organize. These realizations of our inability to reach some of our goals were really sad and discouraging. However, our determination and our progress so far is what pushes us to work even harder for what is left. We managed to collect some money and material donations to build bathrooms, fix the windows, and make a small library.

I personally believe that I worked beyond my capacities last trimester to make this project a success. I attended all our senior meetings except one, suggested a lot of ideas to collect money, and participated in the planning and organization of all the events. However, I am not fully satisfied with what we have done so far. That is because I expected our budget to be larger by this time in order to make more changes in the school of Tarmilat and provide the students with a better educational environment. I am not letting this dissatisfaction and disappointment pull me down, but I am using it as a motivation to work even harder for the rest of the year until the project comes to reality. I am also really hoping that all people understand the situation of our neighbors, the students of Tarmilat, and help us support them by donating money, books, clothes, medications, and any other useful material. I believe that by working together as a community we can draw a smile on these kids’ faces.