Remember what I am going to tell you now forever and ever: remember that nothing is bad! And if something goes wrong sometimes, it will ultimately be good. Never forget this! As soon as someone listens to you, tell him, and especially tell it to yourself very often.

Very far away was a village called Semma. And in that village lived a woman named Noura.

Noura had the most beautiful vegetable garden you have ever seen. Fruit trees grew on her plot and she had sown carrots and tomatoes. She grew peppers, aubergines and beans and she never had to go to the market to buy food. In Noura’s kitchen garden grew enough for her and for her neighbors.

Every day she walked to the well, carrying her two jugs on a yoke. There she took water for herself and for the plants in her vegetable garden. What Noura did not know was that she had magical jugs. It were the only jugs in the world that could talk, even if they never did.

Noura filled them by the well, she hung each on a side of the yoke and walked back to her house. One of the jugs was whole. He always arrived full of water at the vegetable garden.

But in the other jug there was a crack. Slowly water dripped out, and by the time that Noura had arrived at her house, the jug was only half full. And sometimes, if she had been walking slowly, only a quarter of the water was left!

This saddened the jug. Every day the jug became more sad and after a long time

he could no longer bear his grief. When they arrived at the well, he began to cry and he spoke to Noura: “I’m so sorry!”

Surprised, Noura looked at the jug . “What is going on?” she asked.

“I am a bad jug,” the jug sobbed, “you fill me every day to the brim, but as you walk home, the water leaks out of me and I always arrive half-filled at the place where you need the water.”

“Oh, jug,” laughed Noura “instead of being sad, you should take a look around on the way back!”

Nouna hung the two jugs on her yoke and started on the way back. The cracked jug looked around and suddenly saw that beautiful flowers were blooming on his side of the road and not on the other side.

“Did you see it?” Noura asked when they had arrived at home. “I knew for a long time that there was a crack in you. That’s why I sowed flowers in the roadside and thanks to the water that dribbled out through your crack, I can always pick beautiful flowers.”

The jug that was whole and that arrived every day full of water at the house, had always been proud. She thought herself better than the jug with the crack. But now that she saw what the broken jug had made, she became jealous and began to cry too. After all, her side of the road was arid and dry and nothing grew there.

“Oh jug,” said Noura to her, “are you starting to cry too? It’s true that no flowers grow on your side of the road, but thanks to you the most delicious vegetables of all the village are growing in my vegetable garden!”

“She’s right,” the jugs said to each other.

“We both do something beautiful in our own way!”

And from that day on, the jugs never said anything again. But even without words the jugs remained magic: one that brought all the water to the vegetable garden, and the other one that watered the flowers along the way.