Senior Project Reflection by Zainab

Monday, January 29th, 2018

The Senior Project is not something I started thinking about this year. That is because I have been collecting ideas in relations to it since last school year. I have always wanted to do something to help other people and specifically a school. I had in mind the Tarmilat school and another one in the Ifrane regions. I got the chance to share my ideas with my classmates during the month of October in the Azrou Center. When they did the same thing, I realized that a few had the same idea as me, while others had completely different goals. However, we made a huge decision which was to work as a team and combine all of our goals into one. This resulted in the Senior Project being to help the Tarmilat school, go on an Italy trip to visit NGOs and monuments, and finally hold a soccer tournament with the kids of the school. We then decided to specify our goals because saying that we will help them was not enough. That was something we did with time, but for the meanwhile we only had a general idea including changing desks, painting the walls, and even build another building or floor because we did not visit the school at that time.

Many changes were made in our goals since that day. When we came back to Ifrane, one student decided to work on a different school that she had visited and that is the Zerrouka school. We then gave a presentation to our two school principals about our project and they also advised us to narrow down our project a little bit more. We started having meetings on every Thursday to specify the goals of our project, decide what events we would hold to collect money for the school, and work on the trip. However, the major step we took was visiting the school as a class to know what the kids really need. On the 23rd of November, we went all together to the Tarmilat school and talked to the kids, the teacher, and especially the director. We sat together with the principal of their school in Mrs. Yettou’s house, a very generous woman who welcomed us with warmth. We discussed the issues of the school, however we were not able to conclude exactly what the school needs as we realized that it needed several things including water, electricity, bathrooms, heaters, windows, and teaching tools.

A few days later, we invited a teacher to one of my classmates’ house to discuss in details what would be needed and that is where we learned even more things about the school. Unfortunately, we learned that there were more problems in the community including cases of sexual harassment which was shocking. The teacher helped us a lot by giving us a list of things that are needed in the class. After a lot of thought, we as a class decided that is was best for us to follow the list she gave us that includes many things such as a library, more tables, window fixing and many more things. However, we decided to build bathrooms to decrease the cases of sexual harassment in the community and that is our final goal.

Since the month of October, we have held several events to collect money and those include movie nights, a Halloween Party, a small marathon entitled Miles4Charity, and a Eid El Mawlid celebration. From these events, we collected around 7000 MAD. This is a pretty good amount of money that we have collected all together as a team. I have also contributed with efforts to collect this sum. Those are to attend meetings all the time, to help in the organisation of all events, giving ideas about what to do, push people to work, being committed to go visit the school, and taking other people’s ideas into consideration. However, I also had some negative things I did and had to work on. The major one was that I was working with a faster paste with other classmates and did not wait for others. I corrected myself by slowing down and waited for others. Our goal also changed with time. One students left the group and decided to work on the Italy trip alone and work on it as a separate project. This made us divide tasks to work faster on the project. Some people will work on the building bathrooms, others on the material such as desks inside the classroom, and I will be working on the fixing of windows. This is something very important for me that I will have to accomplish as soon as we receive the permission to start making modifications in the school.

Several changes were made in our project. We had several ups and downs as a team. However, we accomplished many things. Those are collecting money, figuring out what the kids actually need, visiting them, working on papers, meeting us with parents that can advise us, and dividing tasks to work faster. We still did not start working physically working there, because we are still waiting for the permission from the government to do so, but we are ready to do so as soon as we have it. With time, we realized that building a new building or floor was unrealistic and now the most important thing to accomplish for me is the protection of kids in relation to the sexual harassment cases by building bathrooms, work on the windows so they could stay in warmth, and try to provide them with everything the teacher told us. Another very important thing is to visit them whenever we can to build a real sense of trust between us and do activities with them to draw smiles on their faces. My next personal step is to be committed in visiting them all Saturdays with my class on Saturdays of the month of February and to take make sure that their windows are well rebuilt as it is my task. Attending meetings and working on the collection of money is also something I should be able to do all the time. In the end of this year, I would like to be able to tell the ASI community that we were able to help those kids. We accomplished all the goals we set and that they are happy just like us. I would also like to be able to tell them that we worked as a team and we accomplished this altogether although we were not always on the same page. I would like to convince them with our work to carry on and help that school after we are gone.