Manni's first time leaving Libya — a basketball training camp that opened the world (EP 7).
Manni was 16 or 17 when he was selected for Libya's national youth basketball squad and sent to a training camp in Serbia. It was his first time outside the country.
He described the experience as formative in the simplest sense: he did not know how to behave. He could not communicate. He did not understand the culture, the food, the expectations. Everything was unfamiliar.
He learned by watching the older players in the squad — how they carried themselves, how they interacted, how they adapted. The trip was not about basketball technique. It was about learning that the world was larger than the one he knew.
Sport literally opened the world to Manni before most people in his circle had left Libya. While his family expected him to follow engineering or medicine — the traditional Libyan career path — basketball was taking him to Serbia as a teenager.
This was the beginning of a pattern: using sport as a gateway to other cultures, other cities, other ways of living. The trip preceded any conscious career decision. It preceded the revolution. It was simply a young man discovering, through basketball, that there was more out there.