Senior Guadalupe Obayi (left) prepares for a camel ride in Morocco.
It was just last January that Eckerd College senior Guadalupe Obayi relished meeting a Moroccan grandmother and her family for a cooking class during a Winter Term study abroad program. In June, she’ll head back as a recipient of the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship.
“I was applying to Fulbright because [Assistant Dean of Faculty] Kat Robinson [Ph.D.] recommended it to me,” Guadalupe explains. “Since I was applying, I already had all the program materials describing why I [originally] wanted to study Arabic and why I wanted to continue my studies in Arabic. And then Kat mentioned the CLS scholarship, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what I want to do over the summer.’”
She’ll depart a few weeks after her May 18 graduation and stay through August, living with a host family in Meknes, Morocco. Guadalupe will be required to work weekdays from 10:00 to 10:55 a.m., take a master’s class, and complete two hours of homework per night. She also is promised individual consultations and language-partner meetings, cultural activities, cooking and calligraphy workshops, history lectures, and excursions to significant sites.
The jam-packed summer will precede her return to the Tampa Bay area to start graduate school at the University of South Florida for Spanish language education. If she receives the Fulbright—she’s a semifinalist—she’ll defer grad school for one year and remain in Morocco as an English teaching assistant for an additional 10 months.
Guadalupe Obayi ’25
Guadalupe (center) holds up a thank-you banner during a 2025 study abroad trip to Morocco led by Associate Professor of International Business Virginie Kharé (right) and Digital Media Production Specialist Penh Alicandro ’22.
Learning languages is Guadalupe’s passion. She’s the child of Syrian-Lebanese Venezuelans who enrolled her in Greek school in Miami. At home, her grandparents spoke four different Arabic dialects along with Spanish and English. In high school, she took math tests in English and Greek.
“Majoring in Spanish at Eckerd, professors would give me the A’s that I deserved in class, but I would still have a paper covered in red marks,” Guadalupe recalls. “I was able to learn so much. And there’s a lot of professors on this campus that are like that.”
Arabic became her minor because she sought to make sense of her own dialects while learning to write in her grandparents’ native languages. She grew so skilled, the faculty asked her to become a tutor in both languages. She also helped revive the Arabic Club on campus and launched an iftar dinner program to introduce students to the cultural gathering. But she hadn’t really put her newly acquired traditional Arabic skills to the test. So Guadalupe signed up to take a Winter Term trip last January to Morocco.
An iftar on Eckerd’s South Beach
“It was wonderful. It surprised me,” she remembers. “I didn’t expect French to be the main language there. It was very funny because everyone was very appreciative that I spoke Arabic, but I didn’t speak their Arabic. So they would understand everything I said, but I wouldn’t understand what they said.”
The Moroccan dialect with its French and Spanish influences differed substantially from what she’d heard growing up and in her college classrooms.
“We did a cooking class with a Moroccan family,” she says.
“We went to their home, and the grandma of the family, she just came up to me, and she’s like, ‘I’m your grandma. I’m everyone’s grandma,’ in Arabic. ‘And since you speak Arabic, you’re my translator. So you’re gonna tell everyone [the other students] how much I love them and how much I appreciate them, because I can’t tell them.’”
That sense of community and purpose amazed Guadalupe and made her excited for the possibility of returning to Morocco after graduating from Eckerd. Though she admits, she’ll miss the College a lot after she leaves.
“I’d maybe been two days away at sleepaway camp from my parents before college. So the idea of going to college 3.5 hours away was very, very scary,” she says. Guadalupe found a friend almost immediately and joined Latinos Unidos, a Latin heritage club at Eckerd, and even became a Resident Advisor for her residence hall.
“My high school senior class had 56 people, so I wanted to go to a small college for the community,” Guadalupe says. “I was in New York during the power outage, and I had no place to go, and I just texted a random Eckerd person that was [a New York] resident, and they just let me stay at their place.”
“It’s Eckerd. It’s family. It’s wonderful.”
