Anera

The alluring smell of freshly baked bread and pies hits you long before you step foot inside Hawazim’s bakery in the West Bank village of Sarta. “My bread-making business is still new, but it is on the rise,” she says, enjoying the bread puns. “Life wasn’t always sweet around here,” the 46-year-old mother of five says. Her smile vanishes as if it was never there. For most of her life, Hawazim tells us, her only purpose in the world was to take care of her husband and children. “I cooked, cleaned, and baked for them with passion. And I did it with love,” she says. Hawazim is in constant motion. As she speaks, she hands a seven-year-old customer her purchase of freshly-made flatbread (or taboon, as it is called in Arabic). Then her husband fell ill. “When my husband was diagnosed with a rare disease, doctors told us paralysis was...