Christian opens first café in Syrian suburb

Cities are full of cafés and restaurants. In Ibrin, a suburb of Damascus in Syria, there wasn’t one – until a local Christian recently returned to open the town’s sole café.

The Syria conflict began in 2011. A year later Joseph Hakimeh, his wife and three children were forced to flee Irbin, just a few of the thousands of Syrian Christians then internally displaced.

‘That period was very hard, we didn’t know what to do or where to go,’ Joseph remembers. ‘I studied electrical infrastructure, but I couldn’t find a good job. We went through tough times.’