Favorite color: Blue

Favorite food: Her mother’s Algerian food

Hobbies: Biking, taking walks, visiting museums, running and reading

Mme Merzougui grew up in a small town in the North of France. After spending much time there, she moved to Paris, where she stayed for five years. Only recently did she move to the US. Mme Merzougui lived in Connecticut for one year and worked there before finally moving to DC this August.

So far, she loves Washington: “I love everything that’s history or politics,” she says, “so it’s the perfect place for that.” Mme Merzougui admires how it’s a perfect mix between a big and small city: there aren’t too many people, but it isn’t very busy, either. “It’s not like New York where everything is intense”, she says, “it’s a lot calmer here”.  She enjoys the atmosphere in the cafes you find in DC, as she likes the way that here, you can just sit down and work quietly, in your own space.

She mentions that the architecture here is completely different from the architecture in France. Mme Merzougui appreciates how everything is organized perpendicularly, which makes getting around this new city a lot easier for her. She also finds many differences between the ways of life of the French and the Americans. “In France,” she says, “People eat later, they go out later”. In contrast, she finds it interesting how things here are done a lot earlier in the day. The new French teacher also has the impression that “people in DC are a lot more relaxed.” She feels that the atmosphere here is a lot less stressed, and she definitely enjoys that aspect of the city.

When Mme Merzougui still lived in France, she travelled all over Europe. Many of the countries she wanted to visit were nearby, so she had more opportunities to explore different parts of the world. While living in Europe, she visited Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, and a few other countries as well. Mme Merzougui has been to a variety of different states in the U.S., but she also hopes to travel to South America sometime soon. If she can, she would love to go to Japan.

As she has travelled to many countries and experienced a variety of different cultures, the language teacher has quite a lot of international exposure. When she was younger, her travels were not as influential to her. She was less independent, so she didn’t have as many opportunities to explore her surroundings. However, once she travelled at an older age, it was then that “[her] eyes opened up completely”. As an independent traveller, she was able to experience the culture the way locals did, and she got more of a chance to interact with the people of the countries she visited. “[Experiencing different cultures] really taught me a lot of things,” she says, “it made me much more open-minded”.

Even though her travels did add to her open mind, Mme Merzougui had already experienced multiple cultures in her early life. Having grown up in France with Algerian parents, she was able to observe and experience two completely different lifestyles. Even without her travels, her diverse background gave her a great appreciation of culture early on.

When asked why she teaches French, Mme Merzougui said that she just loves teaching all languages in general. “For me, there isn’t a language that can prettier than another, more interesting than another”, she comments, “but I teach French because it’s my native language”. French is a large part of her background, and that’s why she wants to teach it. What interests her is not just teaching French to communicate, but teaching French as a means to understand a very rich culture. She believes that that’s why we learn languages: we use them to understand more about others. “That’s what I love the most about WIS,” she says, “we focus on the fact that a language allows us to open our minds, to go discover another world.” During her travels, she realized that when you make an effort to speak someone’s language, they immediately get excited and try start a conversation. “I think that this is what a language is,” she says, “It allows us to create discussions and connections with people”.

If she hadn’t been teaching languages, however, she would have liked to teach history. Teaching is one of her greater passions, and she would enjoy doing it in a variety of topics. She’s also very interested in politics, more specifically geopolitics. She’s fascinated by how how the world works and how different countries are connected, so that’s something she would consider exploring. Mme Merzougui would love to do anything that would allow her to discover and to learn more about the world: she loves exploration, both in terms of culture and in terms of knowledge.

By Alya Al-kibbi