Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly series in which NPR’s international team shares moments from their lives and work around the world.
We went to this Christian village in northern Syria with a former teacher named Abdullah Ibrahim. Much of the village was in ruins – and he told me and my colleague Jawad Rizkallah that he feared the sectarian violence that continues in Syria even after the end of the civil war would soon hit his Christian community again.
But he put those fears aside for a few hours last October afternoon, and harvested his family’s olive trees for the first time since the civil war began. Ibrahim said he had planted many of these trees himself decades ago when he was a teenager.
There is still much to be rebuilt and many hurts of the past to be healed. I think some small part of that healing began, in those moments when the hot sun was upon us, gathering handfuls of hard olives that would grace their family’s table in the future: a taste of home they had been missing for nearly 14 years.
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