A Patience that Isn't Passive

by REI Country Leaders, Morocco

There is a particular kind of patience asked of you when you set out to build something physical, one that has very little to do with the building itself. Long before there is a building, there is soil testing and permitting and design revisions and contractor negotiations, a hundred small approvals that seem to have nothing to do with construction and yet determine whether it can happen at all. From the outside, it looks as though nothing is happening. From the inside, everything is happening at once, though none of it visible.

That is where we have been living for the better part of three years, in the quiet space before the visible part of the work starts.

Coastal with a football court where Moroccans play all through the night

We are in Morocco, working to open a business, and had you asked us when we first arrived what our timeline looked like, we would have told you with confidence that we would already be open, almost a year ago. We arrived in November of 2025 expecting to be building within days and running within months. Instead, we are still waiting on final government approval for construction, finding contractors and more recently have had to work on finding a new architect.

For about nine months we believed our building plans had been submitted and were sitting in a review queue. We were told they had been filed when they hadn't. The company we are renting our space from, and coordinating construction through, had simply never submitted them. We learned this much later than we would have liked, and nine months of what we thought was waiting turned out to have been nine months in which nothing moved at all. Combined with a few other setbacks, our timeline has shifted back by more than a year.

And yet so much of what needed to happen for this project to succeed has already happened. The startup is fully funded, our location secured, and we remain in ongoing conversation with the local government officials about approval. We are ready to sign contracts and order equipment the moment we are given a green light. Every piece is in place except the one that unlocks all the others, permission to build. If things go as we are hoping, we will break ground soon and open in spring 2027.

Hiking through the Atlas Mountains

We have learned that this kind of delay is not unusual. Nearly everyone we have talked with who has tried starting a business overseas tells some version of the same story, of expectations that did not match reality, of communication lost in translation, of a process that rarely moves in a straight line. What surprised us was not the delay itself but how ordinary it turned out to be.

There is an earlier chapter that has given us some perspective. Before this project, an earlier version of this same business had already been in development, facing delays and paperwork complications that seemed to make no sense. Had that first attempt opened on schedule, it would have opened just before pandemic closures arrived, and the business likely would not have survived, with rent due and no way to build and no customers able to walk through the doors. At the time those delays felt like pure frustration. Looking back, they were a big reason the project did not fall apart, though most of the time we still do not know why things take as long as they do.

On a more personal note, we are currently back in the U.S., preparing to welcome our first child, its own unplanned addition to an already unpredictable timeline. It has meant adjustments to how we work on the project short term, and we are grateful for a team on the ground who has flexed alongside us through the transition.

Henri Nouwen speaks deeply on the process of waiting and puts it well by saying, "A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us." That is close to what this process has asked of us, a patience that keeps doing the work in front of it, staying in touch with government offices, interviewing architects, tracking down contractors, so that when approval comes, we are ready to move right away rather than begin another season of waiting unprepared.

View of a village where we were visiting friends

We would rather be telling you a story with a resolution already in it, a finished project, a plan that came together neatly and on schedule. But we have come to see there is benefit to waiting, easy to miss if you are only looking for the ending. We remain thankful for a process that has so far been mostly about learning to wait well. That said, we sincerely hope that our next update will contain evidence of a business started, employees hired and lives being impacted.