Day 4- Thursday

As I said yesterday we spend most of the evening and morning writing up the notes we have taken from our interviews. Camilla is also assembling photos of the area into use able chunks.

We have the morning free, but spend it writing, at 11:30 we're taken to meet a Christian group called Sabeel and sit through one of their services they run to encourage Palestinian Christians in their worship.

Afterwards we have some great conversations, and share lunch with, various people from other charities including a couple of guys from Birmingham and Scotland, and a fellow Norwegian for Camilla to chat away with.

I had a really interesting chat with a Dutch woman who tells me that for 4 months she lived in an Israeli settlement with little understanding of the conflict. It wasn't until she found a couple of sentences in her Lonely Planet Guide book that were promoting Palestinian tour guides that she went outside of the Israeli controlled areas. She spent a few days out with this tour guide (she was his first customer in around 4 months) and suddenly gained another perspective on the land. Since then she joined a charity and now volunteers there.

After this we meet with b'tselem an Israeli Human Rights group who are fantastic. They were founded on the principle that if Israelis were aware of the realities of the occupation they would end it. While things haven't turned out so simply they do simply amazing work to PR the issues around the conflict to Israelis and to lobby the government for social justice.

I urge you to look at their website: http://www.btselem.org/index.asp

As well as giving us some more information on the issues facing Beit jala they talk in general about their work.

One other useful element is a member who takes the time to explain the Israeli Point of View in building the wall, the security situation, the history of Israel and the fear of the Israeli people that they could be threatened as they were in the holocaust again. This is essential in giving us some balance to our view while we are here, and to help us understand that to make a difference we must be bringing people together, not polarising them.

After this meeting we return back and celebrate the birthday of a 5 year old boy who is living in the same building as us. I tell everyone I won't do the karaoke, and then wrestle the mic from the young boy after a few beers to make sure I get an extra go. It's a really fun evening, and I get to play Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles too.

We end up here, in bed, and once more exhausted, try to catch up on background reading and writing notes for the next day, which this blog is keeping me from...