Aisha Azzam examines harvested wheat near Baqa’a refugee camp, Jordan. Credit: Guochen Wang
The Four Stories project's documentary about Palestinian miller Aisha Azzam has been featured in a recent article by Philip Cox. Check out the short excerpt below, and be sure to read the the full article at https://www.uvic.ca/news/topics/2023+vibert-palestinian-food+news!
"It's a late spring day in the Baqa'a refugee camp, home to some 105,000 Palestinians who were born into the overcrowded Jordanian district or settled there after being displaced from their homelands by the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. After months without rain, the days are long, hot and dry.
Within the rejuvenating shade of one of the region’s only stone grain mills, UVic historian Elizabeth Vibert, writing master’s student Guochen Wang, history master’s graduate Salam Guenette and a crew of local teammates are filming an interview with owner-operator Aisha Azzam for a documentary they are producing as part of the Four Stories About Food Sovereignty project—a UVic-led, transnational effort to document community responses to climate change, global economic pressures and political instability through the lens of small-scale food producers on four continents.
'For Palestinian food not to go extinct, the young have to learn from the old,' Aisha explains in Arabic for the camera while three of her grandchildren play near the mill’s wearied industrial equipment. 'Food is the most precious part of Palestinian heritage.'"