Emily Feng/NPR Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR's international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.
We'd gone to this Christian village in northern Syria with a former teacher named Abdallah Ibrahim. Much of the village was in ruins — and he told me and my colleague Jawad Rizkallah he feared the sectarian violence that has continued to plague Syria even after the end of the civil war would soon hit his Christian community, again, as well.
But he set aside those fears for a few hours that afternoon last October, harvesting his family's olive trees for the first time since the civil war began. Ibrahim said he had planted many of these trees himself, as a teenager, decades ago.
There is still so much rebuilding to be done and so many past hurts to heal. Some tiny bit of that healing began, I think, in those moments with the warm sun on us, gathering handfuls of hard olives that would grace his family's table in the future: a taste of the home they had been missing for nearly 14 years.
See more Far-Flung Postcards from around the world:
- Greetings from an Islamabad park, a peaceful vantage point in an uncertain world
- Greetings from Nairobi, where taking a matatu is no ordinary bus ride
- Greetings from downtown Cairo, where unpretentious cafés are part of centuries-old charm
- Greetings from London, where a big COVID memorial holds vigil over the halls of power
