WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

A beer barakot could not have a cup of coffee this morning.

She couldn't have one yesterday morning, or the morning before that, or even three mornings ago.

So I really miss having a cup of coffee, real coffee.

And I miss drinking, you know, coffee with milk, you know,

like this coffee or whatever, with coffee make.

In fact, a beer hasn't been able to experience the pleasure

of savoring a cup of real coffee for months.

And this makes me to something the world needs to know that we Palestinians, we try to make alternatives of everything,

because we are trying to preserve our way of living to the most. For example, we love coffee. Palestinians

love coffee so much. Now we don't have coffee grains. So what did we do? We had an alternative

for it. We have the chickpeas. We burn them, okay?

Chickpeas, those small, round, pale yellow legumes.

You might also call them garbonzos.

Abir says Gazans now roast the chickpeas over a fire until they're completely black.

Then they grind down the small dark spheres and add some spices.

They put card in them on it to give them the taste of Arabic coffee, and we drink it like

coffee. So imagine we now laugh about it. We say, would you like to drink some chickpeat?

We don't say, would you like to drink a cup of coffee?

A beer lives in Gaza City.

We try to survive.

I have alternatives for everything.

...