In this episode we speak to Nadia Barhoum, founder of Thurayya - an initiative to cultivate Palestinians seeds and keep Palestinian crops alive in diaspora. We traveled to her farm in Petaluma where we were able to sit down and talk about what farming means, the significance of seed saving and the dream to build spaces for Palestinians to exist within each other.

ABOUT NADIA
Nadia Barhoum is the founder of a seed-saving and land stewardship initiative called Thurayya. She began farming in 2019, following a desire to be closer to the land in the way her family had been for generations in their small village of Al Malha, Palestine. They were forcibly expelled in 1948 by Israeli armed militias. Through Thurayya, she wants to uphold and restore relationships to the land that have been severed by ongoing occupation and dispossession in the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa region). She is growing out and saving seeds from a variety of vegetables, herbs and other perennials from Palestine and the SWANA region to share with her community in the Bay Area. She hopes these special plants can bring a part of her home and their stories back to her community.

In Rising for Our Motherlands, we pracitce Freedom Dreaming. Rooted in the Black radical tradition and illuminated by historian Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreaming calls us to use imagination as a tool for liberation — to envision and build futures grounded in care, resistance, and collective love.

This episode features music from El-Funoun, DAM, & Fairouz

Learn more about Nadia and Thurayya at www.thurayya.org

A huge thank you to Salma Taleb, Hesham Jarmakani, Francesca Juico, Chris Wanis, and Carmelo Ibanez for our beautiful theme music and to our co-conspirator & We Rise producer Cat Petru for weaving our voices and songs together.

Podcast art created by nicole gervacio.

Rising For Our Motherlands is a project born from deep commitments to our people, our homelands, and to one another. This episode features a conversation between friend, kasama, and early collaborator of Rising For Our Motherlands, Nadya Tannous, and co-host nicky, as they reflect on their pivot points, their shared history of organizing, and what it means to build across movements and motherlands.

Recorded in the summer of 2023—before the ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza—this bonus episode captures themes that remain urgent today: internationalism, solidarity, and the power of collective struggle. You’ll hear sounds from the Unity Intifada of 2021, a historic moment of Palestinian uprising and resistance that transcended geographic and political borders, uniting Palestinians from the river to the sea and in the diaspora. Included are echoes from the 2021 Unity Intifada car caravan in Yelamu (San Francisco), featuring the voice of Lubna Morrar chanting in the streets—an early vision for what Rising For Our Motherlands would become.

This episode reminds us that the liberation of Palestine is deeply connected to other struggles for sovereignty and freedom—especially that of the Philippines. It is a call to deepen our international and joint struggle, recognizing that our futures are intertwined, and that rising for one motherland means rising for them all.


A huge thank you to Salma Taleb, Hesham Jarmakani, Francesca Juico, Chris Wanis, and Carmelo Ibanez for our beautiful theme music and to our co-conspirator & We Rise producer Cat Petru for weaving our voices and songs together.

Podcast art created by nicole gervacio.

Rising For Our Motherlands is a podcast about our love for our people, our lands, each other. Our first season draws connections from Palestine to the Philippines and illuminates our interconnected struggles. In this first episode, we introduce the vision and power behind Rising for Our Motherlands. You’ll get to know our hosts, Maisa and nicky — with a special cameo from our audio producer, Cat — as we dive into key ideas that shape our work: the Military Industrial Complex, the distinction between joint struggle and solidarity, our personal and collective pivot points, and the practice of freedom dreaming.

Rooted in the Black radical tradition and illuminated by historian Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreaming calls us to use imagination as a tool for liberation — to envision and build futures grounded in care, resistance, and collective love.

This episode features some of the following music: America by Bambu, Ya Rayeh Sob Bladi by Ahmad Kaabour, Dialogue by El-Funoun, and Gong Spirits by Gingee.

A huge thank you to Salma Taleb, Hesham Jarmakani, Francesca Juico, Chris Wanis, and Carmelo Ibanez for our beautiful theme music and to our co-conspirator & We Rise producer Cat Petru for weaving our voices and songs together.

Podcast art created by nicole gervacio.

Rising For Our Motherlands is a podcast series about our love for our homelands, our people, and each other. Our pilot season draws connections from Palestine to The Philippines, and illuminates our interconnected struggles in our homelands and as people in diaspora.

In this series we will dig deep into our roots as artists and organizers, building political resistance to oppression, granddaughters of survivors, daughters of diaspora and dreamers committed to freedom for our peoples, and the land. Each episode will explore a theme from how we got inspired to take action in our communities, to the histories of anti-colonial struggle in our motherland -- from the islands known as the Philippines to Palestine. We will talk about strategies for community care and the demands to return to our motherlands, share stories from our families, memories, lessons from our lineages, and get real about what’s happening overseas and in the diaspora right now.

Rising For Our Motherlands weaves together music, poetry, memories and stories with artists, community organizers and leaders, educators, farmworkers, mothers, comrades and kasamas... people who rise for our motherlands every day in small ways, through embodiment, imagination, practice, and direct action

A huge thank you to Salma Taleb, Hesham Jarmakani, Francesca Juico, Chris Wanis, and Carmelo Ibanez for our beautiful theme music and to our co-conspirator & We Rise producer Cat Petru for weaving our voices and songs together.

Podcast art created by nicole gervacio.