When Tala Alatassi was a child growing up in Syria, she knew she wanted to live abroad eventually — but she had no idea she'd be forced to make the move so soon. In 2012, when she was 16 years old, she fled the country to avoid the ever-worsening Syrian civil war. She had dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship (she was born in Canada, but moved with her parents to Syria as an infant), and so, after a short stay in Lebanon, she came to Toronto. Soon afterward, she enrolled in the Daniels Faculty's architecture program, where she is now entering the second year of her Master of Architecture studies.

Tala was just one of millions displaced by the war; it was inevitable that some of the people she knew in Syria would also end up in Canada. Two of her childhood friends, Cedra Taher and Jad Jaffan (both of them, like Tala, had Canadian citizenship and had briefly lived in Canada as children), made their own circuitous paths to Toronto. Cedra arrived in the city in 2018 after stints in Lebanon and England, and is now a law clerk. Jad, who lived in Lebanon and Germany before coming to Toronto in 2019, is a sales coordinator at a flour milling company.

Now that they're all in the same city, the three friends have, almost miraculously, reconnected after years apart — and they're making the most of the reunion by banding together to help others from the Middle East who weren't as fortunate as they were.

Tala, Cedra, and Jad have jointly formed a nonprofit called PieceLalPeace, which sells artwork online and then donates all of the proceeds to NGOs that work in the Middle East. Currently, the main beneficiary of their efforts is the Red Cross, which has been providing humanitarian relief in Lebanon throughout years of political and economic crises, up to and including this month's devastating explosion in the port of Beirut.

From left to right: Tala, Cedra, and Jad.

Each member of the trio has a part to play. Tala, the designer, creates the product: lino prints inspired by conversations with friends in the Middle East. "The prints are handmade," she says. "I carve the sheets myself, and I've tried to make them meaningful and informative. The Middle East is misrepresented in the media. All you see are the disasters that happen there. We wanted to change that narrative."

Cedra, the law student, looks after the technical aspects of keeping the organization compliant with Canadian nonprofit law and disclosure requirements. And Jad, the numbers guy, handles the business and the books.

Their website, PieceLalPeace.com ("piece" meaning "art piece" and "lal" meaning, in Arabic, "in exchange for") currently has a selection of eight different prints for sale, for between $35 and $50. Each one comes pre-matted and ready to frame. The bestseller, at the moment, is Self Reflection, an image of a church and a mosque fused into a single, otherworldly looking building.

Self Reflection, a lino print by Tala.

"All three of us have lived in Lebanon," Cedra says. "Although it has been labelled internationally as a very sectarian country, we wanted to show that that's not quite the case. Self Reflection takes the two dominant cultural religions in Lebanon and shows that way they reflect off of each other. The essence of the point we're trying to make is, all ways are the right ways. There is a harmony between religions, whether it be in Lebanon or in other Middle Eastern countries. I think that's why this piece is our bestseller: because a lot of people agree with that perspective."

Over time, Tala, Cedra, and Jad hope to expand PieceLalPeace's mission to include public education. Tala and Cedra have already created an infographic that traces the timeline of the Beirut explosion.

"Our efforts are eventually going to encompass more countries in the Middle East," Tala says. "Tragedy is very normalized there, and we want to help change that narrative."

Visit the PieceLalPeace website