One year ago today, Michael, Karen, and I finished registering Crossroads Cultural Exchange in Morocco. We have previously shared why we started a cultural exchange in Morocco, and now, as we look back on these twelve months, we are filled with so much gratitude. Over the past year, we created our brand and launched a website and social media, started offering English language services, created and designed our cultural services including The Navigator Program, and networked and built relationships to strengthen our business. In addition, on April 1, we will begin offering language classes in Modern Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, French, and Tamazight. As we have developed and grown CCE, we have learned so much about Moroccan culture and business.

We are still learning. 

On a recent tour of Volubilis, the tour guide mentioned that the moment you should stop learning is the moment you die. Learning is a core value for us in both life and business. Even though we run a cultural exchange center, we are still not experts who know everything there is to know about culture! We are still learning—every day we seek to understand our neighbors in Morocco better as well as understand our world better. And every time we interact with people from cultures that are new to us, we have more to learn! This is a good thing because learning means that we are still living. 

We really love culture. 

We love culture, especially learning about it, which is a little unfair because we mentioned learning in the previous paragraph. But it seems that every day we discover something new about culture in Morocco and culture in general. As we have conversations with the language teachers at our center, we realize that they have so much more to teach us about their rich Moroccan culture. This excites us because the more we continue to develop cultural and language curricula the more we have to share our passion for culture with others. We are constantly reading and discovering more and more about culture, and there are no signs of this love for culture waning. 

We are excited about the future.

As we shared at the beginning of this post, big changes are coming to CCE in April as we start a cultural exchange center in Fes that will not only serve as our home base for cultural programs but will also serve as the center for language study of Modern Standard Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, French, and Tamazight. For the past three years, Michael and I have studied Moroccan Arabic at Arabophon, a language center in Fes. As of April 1, Arabophon will be part of Crossroads Cultural Exchange. We will be located at the same address in Fes where Arabophon has served the community for five years, and the four teachers will continue to teach language for students with a desire to learn. We truly believe that these are the best language teachers in Morocco and the curriculum they use to teach Moroccan Arabic is unique and effective. The opportunity to work with these teachers and the material they teach is thrilling to us and truly a perfect fit, because they already teach both language and Moroccan culture, believing they go hand-in-hand. As we make this transition and brainstorm for the future, we are excited about where we will go together, and cannot wait to share it with you. 

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