Qusin village: Wednesday afternoon.

We had received a message that a farmer in this village needed some help and we decided to travel over; hoping that we might actually get to pick some olives today. Getting to the village necessitates passing through the Beit Eba checkpoint, a bleak place situated right next to a quarry, with the air full of dust. (About Beit Eba - more later as I was able to spend a few hours here during the second week of my visit.)

We arrived in the village via a second servees and waited at the village olive press for our farmer, Saeed, to meet us. He arrived in a battered old car and we piled in for the drive down to his olive trees, along a farm track. Palestinian cars appear to have an extraordainry ability to drive over the roughest terrain, with what to me in this case appeared to be impossibly deep potholes. Halfway along we reached a large earthmound - blocking three quarters of the track. Saeed manouevred carefully round this. The earthmound had been dumped there by the army (I never did find out how long ago) and the villagers do not dare to remove it, although whatever purpose it had served the army in restricting movement had long gone. Now, it was just a nuisance.

Poisoning of the land ?

Saeed's olive groves are towards the end of the track before the land drops away fairly steeply down towards an 'Israeli only' road. On the other side of the road, 'nestling' in what would have once been a beautiful olive grove filled valley, lies a large factory complex, complete with chimmneys. It was explained to us that this is an Israeli chemical factory. The reason the factory is there rather than within Israel itself, is that it would not meet health and safety legislation in Israel. In one of those Kafesque aspects of illegal occupation, within the West Bank Israeli owned factories do not have to comply with Israeli legislation, since they are not inside Israel. But guess what, the Palestinian population have no rights to impose any standards on the factory, let alone to prohibit its existence on stolen Palestinian land. The villagers say that the factory often operates at night and they can smell it clearly. They believe that it is causing health problems in the village, including breathing problems. On top of this they believe that it is poisoning the olive trees. Saeed showed us the leaves of his trees, many of which have small brown spots on the, as have many of the olives. Obviously it was impossible for any of us to know whether the trees were being affected; the problem for the village is that they have no right or means to investigate any of this and of course, the factory owners will not give them any information. We took close up photos of the trees and also some samples, as one of our group is hoping to link up with a sympathetic scientist who has done similar types of investigative work for Palestinians elsewhere in the West Bank.

Saeed was a great character, full of life and clearly enjoying his harvesting, in spite of the challenges. His wife is currently with their youngest child in Amman, Jordan, where the baby has just undergone surgery. But today Saeed had had good news that the surgery had gone well, so he was beaming all afternoon. Sicne the groves are relatively near the village a number of children, both his own sons and some other boys, came after school to help out. Ann produced her endless supply of lollipops for them, and we were soon all the best of friends.

One of the best things about the end of the day's harvesting, when you will seize on any excuse to sit down, is the job of separating the olives from the leaves and twigs, prior to them being bagged up ready for the press. On this occasion one of the children had a plate and showed us the trick of throwing a pile of olives up into the air - the olives miarculously land back on the plate while the leaves etc fall to the floor. Needless to say it didn't work quite like that when I tried it.

ASBO boy

An older boy, aged maybe 14, hung around on the outer fringes of our group. At one point he wondered off and then we heard a pop pop sound. It turned out that he had a gun of some sort and was taking pot shots towards the Israeli road, although at far too great a distance to do any harm. Saeed, accompanied by Scott and Ann, went off quickly to stop him and get him back to the village. I stayed with the other children, who were in a state of mixed excitment and nervousness (so was I, minus the excitment). I could see shows of bravado building in the older two - they wanted to get a piece of the action, whatever that was. Quite how do you distract two 12 year old boys in this situation? They all had their school books with them - inclduing a briiliant student text book called 'English for Palestine'. I grabbed hold of one of the books and challenged them to show me who was best at reading English. And so we moved from gun bravado to giggling English lesson.....

ASBO boy had by now run off back to the village so harvesting resumed. Saeed told us that this boy was 'trouble' - he suspected that the boy had stolen some of his olives earlier in the day. So just how does a local community deal with an out of control teenager growing up in an environment where his parents have no authority and the only people he sees with any power are young Israeli men and women who carry huge M16s slung over their shoulders?