Blessed be this awakening in the ranks of our youth! Blessed be this understanding turned toward the countryside, this taking of good omen in the service of the land, this living with it and upon it in love and hopefulness... This group of our young people has grown weary of the heavy, artificial atmosphere that the city and its civilization impose on the herds of human beings dwelling in it, heaps upon heaps, wearing them down, body and nerves, without mercy, and casting them out as masses of exhaustion...
This aware group of our young people took pity on its nerves lest they collapse, and chose to work and live outside the crush of the cities, on modern farms, with nature — bending tenderly over the land, tilling it into flourishing orchards of golden and red fruit, or ordering it into poultry farms, chickens and eggs... And how quickly the dream comes true, and the project buds, and rises into being, and grows!.. And how sweet it is when eyes shine with the smiles of deep, all-embracing joy.
And the glad tidings spread: hillock whispers them to hillock and poplar to its sister, and the goldfinch lets them fly with a song at dawn; and another man, despairing of his livelihood and of his job, hears them — and how lightly he seizes the idea and adopts it... and on the morrow a second farm rises... and the modern farms multiply and reach the dozens, sprinkled with art across the fertile, far-stretching plains of the Bekaa, or in the outskirts of Beirut and the other Lebanese towns... each farm with its own color and its own new style, each farm with its own concerns and its new manner of living.
The Shuman poultry farm at
Hizzin is a singular model of the farms we wish to see spread through our plains and on the shoulders of our mountains.. On this farm live the young couple, Hasan and Nahla Shuman. Their splendid, well-ordered work, which all their friends and acquaintances envy them, is the child of two years — from the day Nahla, of her own full consent, gave up her polished Beirut society and went down to the neighborhood of Baalbek, to found a model farm with her bridegroom Hasan..
The first stages of the project were not strewn with roses for the two pampered children of the city; but the couple managed, thanks to their faith, their energy, and their knowledge, to overcome the difficulties one by one, and to smooth away every obstacle on the
road to bringing their farm to the level they wanted.
The beginning of the project has an amusing story, whose stage was two rooms behind the house, in the days when the weekly output of broiler chickens did not exceed thirty birds. Nahla recalls, by way of a joke, that she and Hasan would spend the whole day plucking the thirty birds, and when they had finished that operation they were at a loss by what means to push this quantity to the market and how to guarantee its sale!. Now there is no longer any problem of that kind: the project has four large buildings, and production has grown from 30 to 250, then to 500, until it has now reached 1,000 — yes, it has reached a thousand roasting chickens in a single week... And
Nahla and Hasan in their salon with "the delegates from Libya"