In this episode we speak to Nadia Barhoum, founder of Thurayya - an initiative to cultivate Palestinians seeds and keep Palestinian crops alive in diaspora. We traveled to her farm in Petaluma where we were able to sit down and talk about what farming means, the significance of seed saving and the dream to build spaces for Palestinians to exist within each other.

ABOUT NADIA
Nadia Barhoum is the founder of a seed-saving and land stewardship initiative called Thurayya. She began farming in 2019, following a desire to be closer to the land in the way her family had been for generations in their small village of Al Malha, Palestine. They were forcibly expelled in 1948 by Israeli armed militias. Through Thurayya, she wants to uphold and restore relationships to the land that have been severed by ongoing occupation and dispossession in the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa region). She is growing out and saving seeds from a variety of vegetables, herbs and other perennials from Palestine and the SWANA region to share with her community in the Bay Area. She hopes these special plants can bring a part of her home and their stories back to her community.

In Rising for Our Motherlands, we pracitce Freedom Dreaming. Rooted in the Black radical tradition and illuminated by historian Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreaming calls us to use imagination as a tool for liberation — to envision and build futures grounded in care, resistance, and collective love.

This episode features music from El-Funoun, DAM, & Fairouz

Learn more about Nadia and Thurayya at www.thurayya.org

A huge thank you to Salma Taleb, Hesham Jarmakani, Francesca Juico, Chris Wanis, and Carmelo Ibanez for our beautiful theme music and to our co-conspirator & We Rise producer Cat Petru for weaving our voices and songs together.

Podcast art created by nicole gervacio.