Grow Peace by Chocolate
We are a family who makes chocolate.
Four years ago we lived happily in Damascus, Syria. Our father owned a chocolate factory, employed many people and shipped chocolate all over the middle east.
In an instance our lives changed - My father and his staff left the factory just minutes before it was destroyed by a missile. With nothing but each other we started a new journey and ended up in Lebanon where we stayed in a refugee camp for three years. We spent many nights trying to stay warm and dreaming of a brighter future.
Eventually we moved to a small town in Canada, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where we now call home. The people here have welcome us warmly and have helped us in many ways.
We make chocolate again.
In late September 2016 we received international recognition for our little business when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told our story in an address to the United Nations. We were very excited about this and the attention has been wonderful! At the same time it has presented challenges. We are receiving orders and projects we never imagined before. Our business is on the cusp of success but we do not have the processes and infrastructure in place to meet the demand.
We’re are starting a 30 day campaign and asking for your support. Your generous donations will allow us to:
1) Get our chocolate on store shelves by conducting the detailed and important Product/Consumer Testing & Certifications big stores require.
2) Expand, create new jobs and sharing our chocolate with the world. That means we need a bigger factory (our current one is a tiny 100 square feet!).
3) Tell our Canadian Syrian Refugee story – When much of the world closed its doors to us Canada welcomed our family (and 25 000 Syrians) with open arms. We want to ensure our story stands for generations and so we will build into our new factory a record of what happened to us and how Canada changed our lives forever.
Thank you for taking the time to read our story. We are Canadian and look forward to telling the Syrian story.