Nas talks fast because his brain moves fast. He can take you deep into the trenches of a subject without you realizing you were ever standing at the edge of a new topic, and he’s constantly in motion.

This is likely one of the reasons why the New York City-based Palestinian entrepreneur has already seen more of his ideas come to fruition than most of us could dream of in a lifetime. To name a few, he’s been a part of producing an award-winning film, opening a restaurant, running a series of pop-up dinners benefiting refugees, co-founding the food experience start-up Komeeda, advising a kitchen incubator in Turkey that trains refugees to build food businesses, hosting a New York City festival of refugee food and art, and, at the time of writing this article, he was in Morocco on a gastrodiplomacy mission to introduce American halal beef and poultry to a new part of the world.

Now, as a 2019 GATHER Fellow, he’s using his experience in gastrodiplomacy and storytelling to help lift refugees out of poverty, and at the same time, coming full circle on his own story of conflict and loss of community.

For Nas, much like the refugees he works with, you have to take the time, be willing to peel back the layers, to even begin to see the whole picture.

A WINDING PATH FORWARD

Nas was just a child the first time he realized that food could be much more than fuel for the body.

“I can tell you all the cliché things, like food brings us together, the way to the heart is through the belly,” said Nas. “And they’re all true, but it’s also one of the cheapest things to weaponize.”

Growing up in a small farming village in the West Bank, Nas saw his family’s future, and past, turn into ashes, as their olive trees were burned one by one to make room for the expansion of the nearby Shilo settlement.

“Those trees had been planted by my grandmother’s grandfather,” he said. “She cried harder for those olive trees than when her husband died.”

His family did not have much money, but with a keen sense of a good opportunity when he sees one, Nas found a way to make cash fast at the age of 13: traveling to Jerusalem to buy adult videos that he would then sell at a markup in his village.

It sounds like the kind of side hustle a cheeky teenager in a movie might come up with—but it came with serious consequences. A few of his clients were caught stealing money from a charity donation box, and soon a trail was traced back to Nas for what they had used the money to buy.

As punishment, his father pulled him out of the nearby private school run by American Quakers and for a year sent him to the village school, which he said, to put it mildly, was vastly academically inferior to the Quaker school.

Seemingly overnight, he went from being one of the most popular kids in the village to becoming a social pariah. The only person who would talk to him was a boy from the poorest family in the village who was also shunned because his grandfather had been an Israeli military sympathizer.

With the sudden ostracization, Nas went into a deep depression, and was eventually diagnosed as bipolar. During that time he also developed vitiligo, a condition sometimes triggered by extreme stress in which pigment is lost from areas of the skin.

The two-tone patches on his face are a permanent reminder of the trauma he experienced in his formative years, and yet, he says it gave him an important insight that aides him today: to see how quickly others are to judge a person for their current situation in life without bothering to learn the full story.

“It allowed me to understand that you have to talk to and engage with people,” he said. “It is so important for us to look beyond what we see in front of us.”

It was a lesson that would serve him well years later, working in kitchens among other immigrants and navigating the metropolis of New York City, where he moved to in 2001.

After a few years of working sales jobs, he enrolled in Baruch College with the goal of becoming an investment banker. Unfortunately, he graduated just as the economy was beginning to bottom out, and he couldn’t find a job in finance.

Instead, he began waiting tables at a chain of barbecue restaurants in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. As he recalls, it was an extremely difficult time—he was embarrassed that he was still waiting tables while his friends were starting companies, buying apartments, and moving on with their lives.

“I felt like a failure, and I was really, really depressed. So at 30, for the first time, I went to therapy.”

It was a major turning point for Nas, one that would finally allow him to stop comparing himself to his friends and set his own future in motion.

“I decided to take ownership of waiting tables and see how that works,” he said. “Eventually, I became the best seller of wine, one of the best cooks on the line, you name it.”

In the back of those barbecue kitchens and many more after, he would hear the stories of immigrants from Mexico struggling to make a livable wage, see how a decision as small as the source of the mint garnishes for your lemonade can make all the difference to one farmer, and learn pride in serving the food of his homeland.

And it was while working at the immensely popular Lebanese restaurant ilili that Nas was eventually asked to open his own restaurant, where he began hosting special dinners to tell the stories of the Palestinian diaspora in South America. He received a call from a friend at the United Nations asking if he could help out Lutfi, a newly arrived Syrian refugee who had faced discrimination among his community for being gay.

Nas decided to adapt the dinner series to allow Lutfi to tell his own story for two evenings. Lufti had never cooked a large meal, but it didn’t matter. The dinners sold out, and soon, the Displaced Kitchens series began in collaboration with his startup, Komeeda.

They were immensely popular and went on to help many more refugees find a new way in a new land—some landed full-time jobs, others found apartments, but the point is to help others see there is more to the picture when it comes to refugees, and for the refugees to become self-sustained. Of all his projects, Nas said that these small victories are what make him most proud.

“If I can help you feed yourself and earn a living, it’s a success,” he said.

COMING FULL CIRCLE

There are many projects on Nas’s mind at any time—including making Komeeda into “the Airbnb of food experiences,” the gastrodiplomacy project for the U.S. government, a book, a television show, and setting up kitchen incubators for refugees in Sweden and Yemen.

But no matter where he is, or how much time passes, the conflicts of Nas’s youth—between Israelis and Palestinians, and the competing chemicals in his brain—seep into everything he does: his work, his motivations, his relationships, “everything.” “Every single thing, relates to the conflict,” he said.

And for Nas, that’s part of why he needed Seeds of Peace, an organization that, as a Palestinian youth growing up amid conflict, he once considered an agent of Normalization. It wasn’t so much the prestige of a fellowship, networking, or the entrepreneurial development that led him to apply to GATHER, but rather, a need to see a vision of the world in which he’d like to live, and immerse himself further in a community of changemakers working to make it a reality.

“Seeds of Peace allows me to find some healing and support for the conflict—to understand and work with what I assumed for a long time was the enemy,” he said. “I care about the actual mission of Seeds of Peace, for the future. That’s more important to me.”

He sees his purpose today to carry on the mission of humanitarian minded chefs like José Andrés and Anthony Bourdain. And though one meal is not going to solve the world’s problems, it can be a gateway to starting a conversation that might not have happened otherwise.

“I care about bringing stories to life and talking about difficult subjects through food,” he said. “How do I sit down and talk with you about solutions to the conflict in the Middle East? Let’s start through hummus and falafel.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Nas and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

“Storytelling is the glue that keeps everything together.” Wael, a 1993 Egyptian Seed and 2019 GATHER Fellow, sees stories everywhere.

From newspaper articles, to TV commercials, to religious texts, Wael considers stories to be a defining element of the human experience. “Entire societies and civilizations come and go based on stories and the telling, retelling, re-adapting, and revising of them,” he explained.

Wael has always been a storyteller. Born and raised in Cairo, Wael’s mother was a painter and researcher and his father co-owned a sound stage, so he grew up surrounded by—and with a deep appreciation for—the arts. Before becoming a filmmaker, he was a self-described “theater kid,” a marketing professional, and a comedy club ticket salesman—all of which, in one way or another, developed his storytelling skills.

Currently, as a project-based media professional, Wael produces content ranging from documentaries, commercials, and branded content for the corporate and NGO world. He also spends part of the year as the director of the Cairo chapter of the Shnit International short film festival.

Wael has never had a desk job. Moving around and meeting new people is a core component of his work. During his travels, Wael was regularly struck by Egypt’s ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity and saddened that this diversity was often suppressed rather than channeled into collective progress.

Seeing a clear connection between storytelling and societal change, Wael founded Story Lab, an initiative that builds connections among diverse or conflicting groups through collaborative storytelling workshops.

Consensus, according to Wael, was somewhat easier to build in ancient times because narratives were built around the campfires of civilization. Simply put, Wael is “trying to bring everybody back to the warmth of that campfire.” He is committed to strengthening communal expression so that it can, once again, be used as a tool for connection, collaboration, and change.

Ranging from creative writing, to photography and filmmaking, these workshops bring together diverse groups of Egyptian people—particularly people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford arts programming. Story Lab was built to be responsive to the needs of communities across Egypt, so each workshop serves a different group of people. A photography workshop in Cairo, for example, worked with elementary school children, while a creative writing workshop in Aswan served adult members of the Southern and Nubian communities. A team of freelance creative professionals works with Wael to facilitate the workshops, and Wael himself is an instructor for Story Lab’s filmmaking workshops.

Story Lab works with local partners wherever it goes—from schools, to local government councils, to village elders. Especially in more conservative or rural parts of the country, Wael emphasizes the importance of community members to help facilitate connection and cooperation.

“We access these communities essentially as outsiders and as foreigners,” Wael explained, “there’s a certain cultural distrust. We are often viewed as city-folk, so we try to settle this suspicion by engaging directly with their people, their traditions, and even their cuisine.”

Each Story Lab workshop is structured around a group project. On the first day of any workshop, the brainstorming and bonding process begins with playing games. These games are meant to solicit opinions, tastes, and preferences from all of the participants. Through these games, Wael said, “very quickly the group realizes how much of a common ground they often share.”

Story Lab intentionally engineers groups that otherwise may have never had the chance to sit in the same room—at least not in an egalitarian way. An upcoming workshop in Alexandria, for example, will include a Syrian refugee who was working in a shawarma shop in Alexandria, as well as patrons at his shop.

“They’ve probably never talked about anything in their lives except what they want in their shawarma,” Wael reflected, “this is the kind of dynamic that we’re always trying to transform.”

Story Lab helps people find agency within, and ownership over, their stories. This focus on individual and collective ownership, indeed, is the secret to Story Lab’s success: “Participants are always connected to what they’re learning because it’s theirs,” Wael explained.

In fact, Story Lab’s focus on building connections between conflict groups can be traced back to Wael’s experience as one of the first campers during Seeds of Peace’s inaugural year, in 1993. Wael’s connection to Seeds of Peace is ever-evolving. As he reflected, “Seeds of Peace, for me, is an experience you unpack over decades, not months or years.”

Wael’s time at Camp ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House. He explained that this “honeymoon period,” however, was shattered two years later with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Wael became deeply disillusioned as a result. He remembers thinking: “If what it takes for us to actually have peace is for both peoples to be airlifted to Camp in Maine, then forget it. Peace is unattainable.”

Years later, though, after living in New York and making Jewish-American friends, Wael was able to disconnect his Seeds of Peace experience from political events.

“Politics tends to color things with the wrong colors … it’s the wrong brush altogether,” he said.

“Seeds wasn’t built on what I see on TV or what my family or society tells me,” he reflected. “It was an actual experience that I could go back to. I could go back and remember those bunkmates from Israel, from Palestine.”

Wael explained how personal connections, like those fostered through Story Lab and Seeds of Peace, cultivate tolerance. He acknowledged that tolerance can be acquired intellectually, but, as his experience illustrates, tolerance is often more intense and enduring when it’s emotionally-based.

Wael applied for the GATHER Fellowship in part to expand upon his Seeds of Peace experience as well as to “cross borders with my work and my thinking.” The GATHER Fellows, Wael explains, are “completely diverse with divergent skill sets. But we all need each other’s skills in a way, although we don’t do exactly what the other does.”

This collaboration and celebration of difference that Wael finds in GATHER and fosters in Story Lab brings meaning and purpose to his life. He wants to take the world a step beyond coexistence.

“Coexistence to me, in 2019, sounds cold. I coexist with the people in my building, but we don’t know each other. We don’t have these warm, neighborly relations. We don’t share a story,” Wael reflected. “And that’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to take the world into that warmth, that warmth of community and collaboration.”

This series highlights our 2019 GATHER Fellows. To learn more about the inspiring social change that Wael and our other Fellows are working towards, check out #FollowtheFellows on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.