Our guide will be Manal, an energetic, hope-filled young woman from Bethleh

Nowadays, going to Bethlehem is no easy matter. For Israeli citizens, it's illegal. The "Wall" thoroughly seals it off from Jerusalem. When I first lived here in 1971, it was so easy to go to Bethlehem just down the road from Jerusalem's southern edge. Traffic flowed easily back and forth. The two towns are so close together there is really no undeveloped space between them. But now they are entirely separate realities.
Manal had never been through the Wall to the Jerusalem side since it was built. Friday, when I met her, was the only time she was given a permit -- and even with the permit it took her over two hours of standing line from 7 - 9 a.m. to be allowed through the gate to travel all of about half a mile to the Tantur Ecumenical Institute where the IPCRI conference was held.
If we have time, I'd like to go back to the extraordinary Hope Flowers School for children in El-Khader right next to Bethlehem where I first went with the Compassionate Listening Project in 2001 and to visit the Holy Land Trust in neighbouring Beit Sahour where Michal and I joined a Palestinian-Jewish dialogue group in 1990.