Traveling or Helping?

At the beginning of this school year, we each had a different idea in head as to what to do for our senior project. We shared them all and help each other put the goals into the SMART format, which stands for Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. By the time Mid-October rolled around, we decided to go to Azrou center, that was founded by Al Akhawayn University. We spent around Two days there, in order for us to finalize our goals. As we got to the school, we first started by visiting around the school and saying Hello to the students. We met a lot of the teachers there, as well. We finally got to the library where we spent the rest of our time. We brainstormed and finalized our projects, followed by presenting them to each other. After two days of working on it, we finally came to an agreement: Zainab, Marouane, Salma, Oumnia, Mouataz and I would work on helping the Tarmilat School, and Fatima-Zohra would work on the Zerrouka school. Both of these schools are in neighboring regions to Ifrane, around 10 mins away from Al Akhawayn University, but both live in staggering poverty. These two school lack some of the most bare necessities such as water and electricity. Our class goal was to help these two schools and for the Tarmilat Team, to go to Italy. We had all agreed to go there as we all had sub-goals related to it.

In order for us to achieve these goals, we needed the money to support our cause. Therefore, we decided to host several events that would help us gather the necessary amount of money for us to go through with it. Most of these events were a success as we gathered a good amount of money, but some of the events were very chaotic and hard to handle. Us being us of course, we managed quite well and still ended up with a good night. In preparation for a lot of these events, we would put the posters up too late, or not come on time to prepare for the event itself, which i think is something we all learned from and will try to prevent in the future.

In September, i had expected our project to go very well and us to be very efficient in our way of working. After the first few events i realized, that wouldn’t be the case as stated earlier. We also hadn’t even started looking at plane tickets or anything in relation to Italy. Towards the end of the first trimester, we also encountered the problem of one of our classmates not wanting to go along with the main goal and only focus on the Italy trip. That, along with the tensions amongst the group set us back quite a bit. We still worked through it though, despite the difficulties faced. That individual is now entirely focused on the Italy aspect of this project, and the rest of us are more focused on the schools of our choices. Through all of these hardships, i realized that helping the Tarmilat is much more important to me than going on the trip to Italy simply because i’d rather spend time bettering the kids’ lives rather than me going on a trip for a week and it having no major impact on those in need. We decided to first start by fixing their broken windows seeing as it's cold, building bathrooms for them and providing them with a small library and new furniture. That would be much more helpful to the Tarmilat community than the Italy trip.

As for my personal efforts, i was present to most, if not all, the senior meetings we held in order for us to plan everything. I have helped a lot in terms of events and the preparations of them. Finally, I would really like for our project to be successful and for us to graduate from this school having had an adequate impact on the Tarmilat community. I would like for our help to most importantly be a lasting one.