...Dozens of students from around the globe have joined the *Beirut Exchange,* a two-week program that offers a crash course in the Arabic language and brings participants face-to-face with prominent political, academic and economic leaders in the Middle East.
“Some students coming from Denver, Colorado have never been to the Middle East,” said *project coordinator Nicholas Noe*....
The program, launched in 2008, is hosted twice annually by mideastwire.com, a website that specializes in translating articles in regional newspapers from Arabic to English.
In addition to the Beirut Exchange, the Damascus Exchange and the Istanbul-Ankara Exchange, hosted in nearby Syria and Turkey, are rapidly gaining popularity....