Perseverance

Abdulrahman Zeitoun endured an ordeal that many people would find difficult to do. Zeitoun, as he was known, was raised in a modest fishing village on the coast of Syria. By the time he was a young teenager, his father had died. He and a brother that was just a few years older than he got up early in the day, before sunrise, to go out with the village fishermen to cast their nets for sardines. When he was a young man, he took to the rugged seas as a sailor, a career he pursued for ten years.

Zeitoun learned that it was only on moonless nights that the plankton would be attracted by the lanterns of the fishermen and that it was the plankton that attracted the sardines. Although it was a tough life for an adolescent and really the job of grown men, Zeitoun knew that...