Written by Hacène Baleh for berberosaharan.com 12/07/2011 
For thousands of years the olive tree was one of the most important trees of the Mediterranean Basin. The people of this region always used that ancient tree for food, medicine and working tools. Its fruit is eaten as it is by taking away its bitterness in soaking it in salt, or a good olive oil is extracted from the fruit.
I learned so much from my parents and from my grand parents that refer to the olive tree in almost every conversation. When I was little, I thought that this olive tree is here to serve humanity in all fields!
For breakfast, bread with olive oil; couscous with olive oil for lunch; and Berkoukes with olive oil, without meat of course, for dinner! The dessert is the olives from our olive tree with our goat or cow cheese.
Do you have curly hair? You use a hand full of olive oil to rub it on your hair before bed for smoothness and strength of your hair; you have an ear ache, sore throat, stomach ache, eye irritation...? So you use few drops of olive oil or you intake one tablespoon before going to bed. And it worked great because our faith was so strong as in the belief that olive oil was there to serve us and there to cure all our diseases.
While poverty knocking at the doors of almost every Kabyle family (Berber), life was so simple and so beautiful, people were so strong and so good to each other, love for others was so pronounced and the union of people was so strong.
People found good topics to discuss and spend valuable time with each other without much in their stomach or in their pockets, but this did not prevent them from living as if there is no better life than that.
We wanted to build a fence to our garden, my father asked us to get the olive tree branches cut during the olive harvest last autumn to use as stakes. Then we wanted to replace the arms for axes, again, my father asked us the same thing.
I thought it was just my father who was so smart to find tricks like that. But eventually I realized that my cousins did the same thing, then my neighbours; again later in time, noticed it in other villages too.
Later, I understood that my father had this experience from his father. His father learned the tricks from my great grand fathers, and so on! That's it, I understood! It has always been like that for thousands of years thanks to our Imazighen (Berber) ancestors who chose the olive tree as the symbol of strength.