Before the missiles came and destroyed his family’s chocolate factory in Damascus in early 2013, pretty much the only thing Tareq Hadhad knew about Canada was the little he’d picked up from MTV.He’d heard of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. He’d heard that Canada was “a nation of diversity.” What the rest of his family — father Isam, mother Shahenaz and four siblings — knew about their future home was the usual.It “was the coldest country in the world.”Back then, had you mentioned “Antigonish” to Hadhad, he might have responded with the Arabic equivalent of Bless you!“I hadn’t heard about Halifax, or Nova Scotia before,” he laughed this week. “So Antigonish was a surprising destination for me. Antigonish is not famous across the world.”But what a few years it’s been. And what wonderful ambassadors for Antigonish the Hadhad family has become.On Sept. 9, less than two years after landing in Canada — safe haven after three years in a refugee camp in Lebanon — the Syrian family celebrated the opening of a new chocolate factory in the little Nova Scotia university town that took them in.The accomplishments of the Hadhads, their gratitude to the locals who helped them and their almost immediate giving back to Canada have already been the subject of a TED talk by Tareq, a documentary about their experience, a speech by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the United Nations, and earned Tareq an appointment to Invest Nova Scotia, the province’s economic development agency.Their extraordinary story began more than 30 years ago, when Isam Hadhad was teaching himself to cook.“He came back to the house one night and told my grandmother that he wanted to learn to cook with chocolate,” Tareq explained.In the family telling, Isam Hadhad’s inspiration came after attending a wedding.“After the celebration he wa ...
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