I'm Anela. Creator, author, founder of Unfiltered & Fed.

I’m someone who’s always humming and singing to herself, so much that I don't even notice anymore.

I'm extremely blunt and very comfortable defining and enforcing my boundaries.

You'll get political commentary and curse words in a lot of what I share here as I think creativity should be an outlet for the full expression of our humanity.

I bury the good stuff at the bottom of these drops on purpose because I want us all to slow down and take things in, myself included. So you’ll typically find events, paid subscriber perks, the things I'm actually excited about at the end.

I'm also a nerd. A library kid who never stopped loving to learn. It's why I love languages, and why I love travel. You get to learn about a place, about people, about culture all at once.

That's where this series comes from, and I've got a new one for you today.

From is an ongoing series where we hire writers from the places I travel and lead trips to. It supports independent writers and it lets us peek at how people really live.

This one's from Lebanon and it was shaped by this year, when the U.S. started a war with Iran. I had to cancel our Jordan trip last minute, which still stings, and I lost my own trip to Oman for the rose harvest too. I'd meant to spend a few days in Jabal Akhdar, on the terraced slopes of that green mountain, watching farmers hand-pick damask roses to make rosewater.

As self-interested as I can be, those cancellations got me thinking about everything else that gets washed away by violence and war. How traditions, plans, and rituals are uprooted, and how people try to hold onto them anyway.

More on that below.

By Fadia Jomaa

Steam rises slowly from the kitchen of a public school-turned-shelter in Tyre. Two copper pots sit on gas burners. It's relatively calm now in the Southern Lebanese district that had witnessed violent Israel airstrikes since the war started early March.

The orange blossom smell that fills the room is warm, sweet, and citrusy. Zeinab Mahdi, a single woman from the border town of Naqoura in southern Lebanon, her hijab patterned with red flowers, stands beside her sister Amira, watching the drops of orange blossom water fall into a clean container. On a third burner, a small dallah (kettle) of Arabic coffee is already on. She was expecting visitors.

This is where the story began, in Tyre, then Sidon, both in south Lebanon, and finally Beirut, tracing a culinary season that some Lebanese women kept alive despite the war.

Every spring in Lebanon, between March and April, the white blossoms of the bitter orange tree, in Arabic the abou sfeir or naranj, appear along Lebanon's 220-kilometer Mediterranean coast, and the distillation season begins. This year, the season had to survive displacement and a harvesting season under missile attacks.

“The smell of orange blossom puts me at ease,” Zeinab said as she adjusted the flame.

In the last three years, Zeinab was displaced from Naqoura twice. The first time was in 2023. When this war broke out, she fled, grabbing little more than some clothes and bare essentials, including her karkeh. Her home was later completely destroyed.

The karkeh is a traditional copper distillation vessel that has been used for centuries across the Levant to extract aromatic water from flowers and herbs.

The scent of bitter orange seeped under the door and into the corridor. Passerby would stop, inhale it, and for a moment forget where they were.

Proudly Zeinab held up the large glass bottle she had filled from the previous day's batch. “I made it,” she said with a big smile. It was clear as water, lighter than perfume, with a sweetness that lingers. She brought twenty kilos of blossoms this season, far less than her usual hundred or more.

Harvesting the orange blossom was itself a victory. “I managed to get 10 kilos from a field owner in the Sidon suburbs, at $5 per kilo,” she said. “The other 10 kilos were a gift from my friend in Tyre.”

Zeinab had soaked the blossoms the night before. She was mid-process, distilling half her batch across the two karkehs. The fragrant steam was rising, traveling through the coiled copper pipes and dripping into large glass bottles fitted with funnels, each covered with a piece of unscented colorful cloth to catch impurities.

“You pick the blossoms early in the morning, before the sun peeks, which is also when the fragrance is strongest,” she said.

“One kilo of flower to one liter of water. You seal the vessel tight, set it over a medium flame, and you keep changing the cold water around the pipe, or add ice, otherwise it won't condense properly,” Zeinab said.

Mazaher, in the Lebanese dialect, fuses the words for mai, water, and zahr, blossom, is a fragrant distillate made from those flowers. This water reaches further than most realize, as Zeinab explained.

“A few drops in the syrup of baklawa (or baklava) give the pastry its unforgettable fragrance. It is used in milk-based sweets like rice pudding. It also goes into maamoul, the semolina shortbreads eaten at Easter and Eid.”

But mazaher is not only for sweets. “A few drops added to savory dishes: stews, stuffed vegetables, certain meat preparations. These neutralize unwanted gamey or fatty odors,” she said.

Zeinab will sell some to cover costs, and the rest she will give away to her friends.

In Abra town, east of Sidon, Ibtissam Khoury spoke about the orange blossoms with deep reverence. “It is a symbol,” she said, “not merely a crop.”

She stood in the garden of her parents' house, where she had come early that morning to help her mother Bahia make orange blossom water. The trees in the backyard were full of blossoms, so dense with fragrance it was almost dizzying. It felt like a different world from what was happening outside, where the sound of drones and strikes from neighboring villages carried into this small quiet garden of ten trees.

Ibtissam listed everything the tree gives, flowers and fruit alike. “The water, the jam, the juices, the medicinal uses, the white coffee,” she said.

White coffee, in the Lebanese tradition, is hot water with a few drops of orange blossom water added.

“The tree gives fifty to a hundred bottles, but this season is much more modest, due to the premature heat.” She paused. “The blossom is beautiful and fragrant but delicate. Too much sun and everything ripens too fast. The cold weakens it. Rain ruins it. It demands precise timing, one that cannot afford to be wrong.”

Bahia Khoury, Ibtissam's mother, is white-haired, unhurried, at home in her ground-floor house in Abra, ringed by citrus trees.

Bahia wore a loose green top. “I used to be thinner than all of you when I was younger,” she said, laughing.

She walked through her garden, gathering orange blossoms from her trees, and held the bundle to her chest like she was hugging it.

Bahia had set up her copper karkeh in a modest room next to her house, its walls bare and unplastered, used for seasonal preserves. She had picked the blossoms early the previous morning. As the orange blossom water came to a boil, she stirred it with a lemon tree branch.

“I did not grow up making mazaher, a neighbor taught me later in life,” she said.

She does it as an act of self-sufficiency, selling each bottle for around $20, and because it is a ritual she has come to love.

“For colic, for the stomach, you add it to warm water to make white coffee,” she said. “In summer you put a few drops in cold water. One calms you down, the other wakes you up.”

Then she stood before the karkeh for a brief, silent moment. She made the sign of the cross on the copper vessel. “This is how we believe,” she said quietly. “The Lord will bless it.”

She sat beside the pot, and waited. Two hours later the first drops came. Outside, a sonic boom cracked the sky. Her seven-year-old granddaughter Mary screamed and ran to her.

Bahia held the little girl and calmed her. “It's only a sound, calm down my love,” she said.

The karkeh kept dripping.

Displaced in Beirut, preserving rituals

“The blossom may carry the scent of a place that no longer exists,” Rana Ghanawi, a sociologist who has been observing displaced communities throughout the war, said. “It becomes a symbolic bridge between the beautiful there and the here that is trying to heal.”

“War dismantles rhythm," she added. “There are no clear seasons, no stable customs, no familiar time structures. Distilling blossoms can be a way of reclaiming a small rhythm.”

Fatima Zein knows this better than most. Born in the southern village of Al-Abbasiyeh, she had spent every spring of her life distilling 150 bottles of mazaher, distributing them, selling them, living the ritual as she always had, at home or through the agricultural cooperative she worked with. Her husband used to source the blossoms directly from the orchards he worked, and the smell of orange blossom water had become inseparable from the smell of their home.

Earlier this season, Fatima had received a batch of blossoms from Maghdoucheh, Lebanon's self-described capital of orange blossom production, but was forced to flee in the middle of the night and left everything behind. “It felt like I left my heart in the house and walked away,” she said.

In the Nweiri area of Beirut, where she was displaced at her brother's, everything stalled. Two bedrooms for nine people, with nowhere to be alone and nowhere to work undisturbed. The roads were dangerous, the orchards far, and the season was slipping away. Her husband, who used to help her source and pick the blossoms, had passed away from cancer shortly before the war.

Then a neighbor brought her five kilos of blossoms from Al-Salihiyeh, a village just outside Sidon. She called it “the biggest gift.”

The moment she spread the flowers across the table, she said, her brothers and their children gathered around, sorting and cleaning the blossoms together. The smell filled every corner of the small apartment and gave it a warmth it hadn't had before.

Her family didn't complain about the disruption. “They told me: the apartment is small, yes, but what matters is that you feel at ease,” she said.

On April 8th, the day I scheduled the interview with Fatima, more than 150 airstrikes struck Beirut, part of an operation Israel had named “Eternal Darkness,” which killed at least 357 people across Lebanon.

We could not meet in person, and postponing was not an option either because the blossoms would wilt, and once they do, there is no distilling them. The fear in her voice was total. A strike had landed very close to where she was sheltering. Fatima survived.

Fatima called back the day after. Her voice was different, lighter.

The interview happened over the phone, and in the background, small children could be heard screaming, not from the strikes, just the ordinary chaos of an overcrowded apartment.  She had distilled. “It made things easier,” she said. “It was like a new birth. It gave me a new life.”

A season under pressure

The orange blossom season in Lebanon was not easy this year, nor the year before, even without a war.

“Two consecutive years of erratic weather and rapid climate shifts have already reduced the harvest from around 100 tons in previous years to approximately 30 tons this season,” Alan Kattan, an orange blossom water producer in Maghdoucheh, said.

“The war made things worse. Customers could no longer travel to south Lebanon to buy blossoms, and the price per kilo rose from three dollars to five or six” he said.

Muhammad Al-Husseini, head of the citrus farmers union in south Lebanon, said the orchards in south Lebanon are now “under threat.”

“Farmers could not reach their trees to harvest, and the displacement of the women who do the distillation disrupted the entire production cycle,” he said.

According to Al-Husseini, mazaher is a cornerstone of Lebanon's seasonal practice of home preservation. “It is a vital supplementary income, particularly for women who produce from home or through agricultural cooperatives,” he said.

On April 16th, Lebanon entered a ceasefire, though violations have been frequent. The orange blossom season has ended.

“I still have hope that I'll go back and work again,” she said. “Maybe next year I can start over.”

For Fatima, those five kilos were enough. The karkeh has gone quiet, the season is over, and the village she cannot return to is still in danger. But for one day in a two-bedroom Beirut apartment, surrounded by nine people and the smell of orange blossom filling every corner, she was reborn.

This article is published in collaboration with Egab.

There is one seat left on our test trip to Vietnam for 2027. We can’t add more, the room allotment is capped, so once this goes, it's gone.

Trip highlights: a street food tour by scooter through the city with the lights whizzing by, an intimate sailing experience out on the water, hands-on time learning to make local dishes, and yes, we've built in time to have custom clothes made. I have to say we really did our big one planning this trip and I can’t wait to experience it with you.

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