#SiegeStories: Laughing off the perils of cooking in a bombed out house.

In besieged Daraya, you don’t throw away stale bread because it’s something of a rare commodity. But cooking it gets a lot more complicated when some unwelcome guests show up.

The Assad regime has been enforcing a total siege on Moadamiyah since 2012, preventing food, medicine and humanitarian supplies from reaching the town. Daraya is dependent on Moadamiyah since there’s a crossing between both towns, so anytime Moadamiyah is under siege, Daraya finds itself cut off from the world as well. Yet, despite the dire situation, people still find humor in difficult situations. Read this heartwarming account by 37-year-old Moataz about the rat that didn’t steal his meal.

Daraya is adjacent to Moadamiyah which has a crossing with regime-held areas. When that crossing is open, we manage to get some goods by smuggling them through Moadamiyah but when the crossing closes, we’re back to eating leaves and animal feed and surviving on one meal a day. Nowadays, we take measures to save some of our leftover food because we anticipate that the regime will close the Moadamiyah crossing at some point, as it always does.

To make the bread last longer without going stale, we toast it. But, you see, most of the houses we live in no longer have facades because of the shelling. At this point Moataz paused and started laughing at the absurdity of a home without a facade. So we have no way of stopping the rats scavenging for food from finding our bread.

The road to Moadamiyah was closed last month and I had saved some dry bread. I miraculously found some yogurt at home and a little oil. I decided to make a big meal out of it and invite my friend over for dinner. While I was heating the yogurt, I glimpsed a rat nibbling on the toasted bread then scurrying away when it heard my footsteps. You see, without a wall, it’s hard to keep those predators away from our kitchens.

When my friend arrived, we stood for a few minutes with our hands on our hips, contemplating this miserable tainted piece of bread and wondering what to do with it. Bread is a very precious thing in Daraya and we’d be mad to throw it away just like that, but at the same time we really didn’t want to get sick. The mere thought of throwing the bread away felt insane because we knew many people in the neighborhood would do anything to have it.

Obviously, we couldn’t even pick up the phone and call a doctor for advice because there aren’t any left in our area said Moataz pausing to laugh hysterically at the absurdity of the situation. So we just toughened up and went for it! We decided that the best way to proceed would be to clean the pieces of dry bread to the best of our ability and then fry them thoroughly to sanitize them. We laughed throughout the whole thing. It’s good to laugh in such situations because we can’t change what we’ve been reduced to. So we might as well laugh.

Even after deep frying it, we felt like the bread was still tainted but we both hadn’t eaten in ages so we were not prepared to give it up. We just dunked it into the warm yogurt, drizzled some oil on top of the whole dirty meal and ate it ravenously.

For the following three hours after we finished eating, we chitchatted nervously and played cards while waiting for the possible onset of food poisoning. It never came, we got away with it that time!

As told by Moataz, a 37-year-old activist in Daraya.