Day 5 - Friday

It's an important morning as we are going to meet the mayor of Beit Jala. It turns out to be an excellent discussion, he expresses a lot of the frustrations of the town and the farmers place within its' structure.

If the Al Markrour mountain region is annexed to Israeli the city will be reduced an area of 1 mile by 1 mile. 100,000 inhabitants have already had enough and emigrated. When we walk into the municipality building there is a large panoramic picture of Chile on the wall. More citizens live in Chile now than do in the city itself.

Communication between emigrants and those who remain is poor, but a lot of the farmers we talk to want to join families abroad.

After having our photos taken by the official photographer with the mayor, and a few that we take of the mayor pretending to write stuff down for us come out really well. On the way out he shows us his cabinet of treasures from the local area and abroad. One of the objects is an image of St George killing the dragon which is sculpted from local rock. They don't have access to the quarry it came from any more as the settlement of Har Gilo was built near it, and the lost access.

There's always a Norwegian connection, recently visitors from Tromso, a town in the North of Norway have left him a glass polar bear, when he discover Camilla is from Norway he pulls out some guide books, and we have a surreal "small world" moment as we leaf through the official Bergen tourist guide with the Mayor.

We head back out to the mountain for some really good interviews with farmers whose castles have recently been renovated. One of the more powerful moments is when I ask a girl what she thinks about the wall cutting her off from this land. "We're already in a prison" she replies, "so what difference does another prison make?".

The farmers we talk to are always able to smile in the face of their losses, but when we press the farmer to talk about his thoughts at being unable to come here he is unable to reply, "It's too difficult to think about".

On one of the previous days we were invited by one of the interview subjects to return to his farmland for dinner. We do so, and are treated to an amazing array of homos and falafel, as well as chicken. It's hard to accept their generosity, they give, and are pleased to give, so much to us as their guests, it's a real pleasure.

Following lunch we have a look at a demolished castle. The land owner built the castle whilst waiting for his permission slip to come through from the Israeli courts. The castle stood for 8 months, but because of a delay in the permission process the Israeli army demolished it. The rest of his farmland is untouched, and he is still keen to farm, having done some work to rebuild the terraces and steps up to them. For now his neighbours help him out.

We end up leaving in quite a rush, having spent too long (as usual) talking to them and taking photos. We end up with a whistle stop tour of the Cremsian vineyards, where some amazing wine is produced. Rather than take a tour, our guide knows the monks that run it (he used to play football there) so we are let in the back door and given a tour of the barrels by one of the people who works on the wine.

We learn a whole lot in about 5 minutes, and just have time to stop to pick up a bottle for ourselves before we are again, rushed back to Bethlehem to meet our World Vision contact and return to Jerusalem.

We spend the evening making sure all of the notes we have taken are transcribed and then settle back with some Gin and Tonic, and freshly picked Almonds to talk the night away with some of the people we are staying with.

Tomorrow is the weekend.