The Syrians displaced from Homs, a city of sev-
eral Roman empresses, survived by picking— and
eating—tomatoes in Jordan. “There is no meat,”
one apologized. “Here we only dream of chicken.”
Homs had been smashed to atoms by Syrian
president Bashar al Assad’s artillery. Some exiles
wept telling their stories. One family laughed
when the grandpa described eating wild grass
to avoid starvation. They shared what they had:
stewed tomatoes, raw tomatoes, pickled toma-
toes. I awoke nights covered in their blankets.
My walking partner, a gruff Bedouin named
Hamoudi Alweijah al Bedul, distributed all our
food. We walked away from these encounters
stunned to silence for miles by the Syrians’ gen-
erosity. Let epicures keep their Maine lobster and
Kobe beef. Never in my life have I ever felt richer,
more nourished, than in those sandy tents.REMEMBER
KHIVA.
I stumbled down the nomad steppe of Karakal-
pakstan to a city that shone like a confection
of yellow sandstone under the sun. More than
four centuries before Europe achieved enlight-
enment, the oasis of Khiva—like Bukhara and
Samarqand—was a center of global culture in
what today is Uzbekistan: an entrepôt of free-
wheeling ideas, science, art, technology, and
languages. Greek philosophy imported from
the Mediterranean helped ignite a gloriousLEFT: In Gaziantep,
Turkey, Syrian brothers
peer out the window
in the two-room apart-
ment they share with
six other relatives. The
refugee family makes
about three dollars a
day selling discarded
plastic items.
RIGHT: A woman
in Zhyngghyldy,
Kazakhstan, prepares
a meal as her child
rests. Her husband
engages in the modern
micro-migrations of
commuting, in his case
to and from the oil-rich
region of Mangystau.136 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC