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How Two Syrians in Rome Are Using Hummus to Aid War Refugees and Help Migrants Integrate 

Ruqaia Agha, a Palestinian woman from Ramla, prepares boxes of falafel in the HummusTown kitchen in Rome, Saturday, July 27, 2024. (AP)
Ruqaia Agha, a Palestinian woman from Ramla, prepares boxes of falafel in the HummusTown kitchen in Rome, Saturday, July 27, 2024. (AP)
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How Two Syrians in Rome Are Using Hummus to Aid War Refugees and Help Migrants Integrate 

Ruqaia Agha, a Palestinian woman from Ramla, prepares boxes of falafel in the HummusTown kitchen in Rome, Saturday, July 27, 2024. (AP)
Ruqaia Agha, a Palestinian woman from Ramla, prepares boxes of falafel in the HummusTown kitchen in Rome, Saturday, July 27, 2024. (AP)

A pair of Syrians have created a community that provides support to migrants and vulnerable people in Rome, by sharing the flavors of a homeland torn by civil war.

Founded in 2018 as a "humanitarian catering service," HummusTown was originally aimed at raising funds for families and friends in Syria.

It has since grown into a successful small business that has shifted from sending remittances to helping new migrants integrate in Italy, all the while gaining a steady following on Rome's gastronomic scene.

As the Syrian war continued to rage, Shaza Saker, a long-time UN employee living in Rome, and Joumana Farho, who was working as her cook, wanted to find a way to help people at home. Farho, 48, brought her "divine" cooking, while Saker, 49, networked.

"I told her: ‘Let's start inviting people over for dinner ... and whatever we make out of these dinners we'll just send to Syria," Saker said. "My house had become a bit of, you know, a restaurant, a home restaurant. But it was fun. We felt useful."

The non-profit that started with 45,000 euros ($48,670) raised through crowdfunding now employs 13 full-time and 10 part-time staff at its kitchen kiosk near Rome's train station and a small bistro, with plans to open a restaurant.

The expanded group now also organizes cooking classes, cultural events and summer aperitifs, as well as catering for events in the Italian capital.

Each month, they donate food to the homeless and last year they raised 40,000 euros for victims of the earthquakes that struck Syria on Feb. 6, 2023, with the loss of thousands of lives.

As more refugees arrived in Rome, the two shifted their focus to providing Syrian asylum-seekers with work and a support network, eventually expanding their mission to all vulnerable people, including Italians.

They include Mayyada al-Amrani, a Palestinian woman who fled Gaza with her eldest daughter, who is getting treatment for cancer. She spends her days rolling traditional spiced rice into grape leaves, working alongside four other cooks of Syrian and Palestinian origin.

While she is able to earn money to help support herself and her daughter in Italy, she worries about her five other children back in Gaza, the youngest not yet 9 months old.

"They are surviving," she said. "They struggle and suffer mostly from (lack of) water."

Fadi Salem, now HummusTown's manager, is a Syrian refugee from Damascus who arrived in Rome in 2022 after living in Lebanon for seven years. Salem discovered the humanitarian catering service through Rome's Syrian community and said it gradually became a family for him.

"I found integration through HummusTown instead of finding it through the migration centers," he said.

"Because from my position here I speak with many Italian and foreign clients, so I practice my Italian, English and Arabic every day," he noted.

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Varieties

Rats Feast on New York’s City’s Bagged Garbage. Can Putting It in Bins End the Smorgasbord?

A resident walks through the courtyard of the Knickerbocker Village housing development in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City, US, November 22, 2024. (Reuters)
A resident walks through the courtyard of the Knickerbocker Village housing development in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City, US, November 22, 2024. (Reuters)
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Rats Feast on New York’s City’s Bagged Garbage. Can Putting It in Bins End the Smorgasbord?

A resident walks through the courtyard of the Knickerbocker Village housing development in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City, US, November 22, 2024. (Reuters)
A resident walks through the courtyard of the Knickerbocker Village housing development in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City, US, November 22, 2024. (Reuters)

For half a century, New York City residents have taken out their trash by flinging plastic bags stuffed with stinking garbage straight onto the sidewalk.

When the bags inevitably leak or break open, they spill litter into the street, providing smorgasbords for rats. In the winter, the trash mounds get buried in snow and remain frozen in place for days, sometimes weeks, reinforcing the city’s reputation as filthy.

Now, New Yorkers are slowly adjusting to a radically new routine, at least for America's biggest city: Putting their trash in bins. With lids.

Earlier this month, covered bins became a requirement for all residential buildings with fewer than 10 living units. That’s the majority of residential properties. All city businesses had to start using bins earlier this year.

“I know this must sound absurd to anyone listening to this who lives pretty much in any other city in the world,” said Jessica Tisch, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, who oversaw the new measures before becoming the city's new police commissioner this week. “But it is revolutionary by New York City’s standards because, for 50 years, we have placed all our trash directly on the curbs.”

Residents who've already experienced trash containerization elsewhere agree it's long overdue for New York City to catch up.

“You see plastic bags open with the food just rotting and stinking and then it leaking out over the sidewalk and into the road,” said John Midgley, who owns a brownstone in Brooklyn and has lived in London, Paris and Amsterdam. “Just the stink of it builds up, you know, week after week after week.”

New York City's homes, businesses and institutions put about 44 million pounds (20 million kilograms) of waste out on the curb every day, about 24 million pounds (11 million kilograms) of which is collected by the city's sanitation department. Much of the rest is handled by private garbage carters.

In the early 20th century, New York City required trash to be placed in metal cans. But in the era before widespread plastic bag use, refuse was thrown directly into the bins, making them filthy and grimy.

Then in 1968, the city’s sanitation workers went on strike. For more than a week, trash cans overflowed. Garbage mounds piled high on sidewalks and spilled into the streets like some dystopian nightmare.

Plastic bag makers donated thousands of bags to help clean up the mess, and New Yorkers never looked back, said Steven Cohen, a Columbia University dean specializing in public affairs.

“It had to do with convenience,” he said. “After the strike, the sanitation workers preferred the modern advance of lighter and seemingly cleaner sealed plastic bags.”

Plastic kept more odors in, compared to the old metal bins. A worker could grab the neck of a bag and easily fling it into a truck.

But Democratic Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has deemed trash bag mounds Public Enemy No. 1 in his well-documented war against the city's notorious rats.

Rats have little problem getting into a plastic bag. Durable bins with closing, locking lids should, in theory, do a better job of keeping them out.

The bin requirement, which took effect Nov. 12, comes with its own challenges. Among them: Finding a place for large, wheeled bins in neighborhoods where most buildings don't have yards, alleys or garages. Landlords and homeowners also have to collect the empty bins and bring them back from the curb in the morning — something you didn't have to do with plastic bags.

Caitlin Leffel, who lives in Manhattan, said residents of her building had to hire someone “at surprisingly high cost” to bring out the bins the night before and bring them back in three times a week.

“I know there are problems with the way this city has collected trash for years,” she said. “But the way this program has been rolled out, it has not taken into account many of the nuances of living in New York City.”

Building superintendents are also grumbling about the added work of bringing bins back from the curb.

“It’s completely rearranged our lives,” says Dominick Romeo, founder of NYC Building Supers, a group of building managers that recently rallied in front of City Hall against the new requirements. “Folks are running around like crazy.”

Eventually, the largest residential buildings — those with more than 31 units — will have their own designated container on the street. New trash trucks built with automated, side-loading arms — another innovation that is already common in many other countries — will then clear them out.

The upgrades should make pickups easier and cleaner, even if it might take longer for trash collectors to make the rounds, says Harry Nespoli, president of the union representing some 7,000 city sanitation workers.

For now, he says, workers are still tossing trash into their trucks manually, which has its own downsides.

“Some places, they’re not even using bags. They're just putting their trash into the bins,” Nespoli said. “It's going to take time to get everyone to do it the right way, but at the end of the day, it's our job to pick it up.”

Tisch believes New Yorkers will eventually come around to the new reality.

City officials, for now, are issuing written warnings for non-compliance. Not everyone knows about the new rules yet. But come Jan. 2, fines ranging from $50 to $200 will kick in.

“No one wants to live on a dirty block,” Tisch said. “No one wants to walk past a heaping mound of trash and trash juice when they are leaving to go to work or they are walking their kids home from school.”