24th December
Bethlehem.
After another generous lunch laid on by the choir, we all made our way to Manger Square, to prepare for the concert. After a tuning-up session inside the Peace Centre we went out onto the stage in front of a packed-full Manger Squareand in front of the gaze of many television cameras. After the call to prayer from the nearby mosque had finished we began, and despite the cold temperatures and difficult acoustics, the concert went well.
On my way home from the concert, after having dinner with some of the visiting students from Nazereth, I stopped off at the shop of a friend called Majdi who had invited me to drink tea with him. As I sat in his souvenir shop, I watched as tour bus after tour bus passed-by carrying visitors from the checkpoint to the centre of Bethlehem. Unfortunately for Majdi, these buses were carrying a valuable source oftrade right past his door, and in the hour I was there not a single customer even entered the shop. As he talked of his responsibility over his late brother’s children as well as his own, the absence of trade on the busiest night of the year was a depressing thing to witness and his insistence that I accept a small Christmas present from his shop was touching and humbling - especially so as Christmas is not his holiday. ‘Maybe tomorrow will be busier’, he said optimistically as I prepared to leave. ‘Inshallah’, I have learned is used at times like this. It means ‘God Willing’, but can also be a between-the-lines acknowledgement that there is not much reason for optimism.
