Hampshire County
Community Story Archive
Sharing Stories, Creating Change
ALIA
Alia recently graduated from Smith College and resides in Northampton. She is the mother of a teenager, an avid gardener, an environmentalist, and a talented writer. Alia loves to cook Middle Eastern food from her culture and share it with her neighbors in public housing. In particular she loves making tabbouleh, especially with fresh produce from her garden!
“Food is about energy, it's also about love,
it's fuel for life.”
“When people are depressed the best way to heal is to eat healthy food… so I was really curious to eat more healthy… The healthy food was kind of, like, a miracle at that time [during the pandemic].”
Check out some interview excerpts below:
“We need nutrition and nutrition come mostly from vegetables, especially with food we grow in the garden… mostly organic…not cans or food like that…I feel very attached to the Earth, especially the vegetable…you pick it up and you wash and you eat it….In our culture [we] share food with neighbors…If the neighbor, takes it, I will be happy.”
“With the pandemic …we faced a lot of difficulties, not only from the food side, but from too many different things happening. ..This was a big event in everybody's life. [We have] more resilience with other things happening especially for us. We're Palestinian and we’ve experienced a lot of trauma…so we already have this resilience.”
“When you are afraid of something, …the fear itself, it's worse than the thing…I would keep life running…take the caution... but not freeze life like we had for a couple of years. There was a lot of negative [that] happened to society, more than the disease itself."