Diving into The Holy Land

For 9 months, my wife and I had the privilege to live in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, the place where our Lord Jesus was born.  We were living and volunteering alongside the wonderful people at the Diyar Consortium, a Lutheran-based cultural organization who’s goal is to give the Palestinian people abundant life through community building, the arts, education, development and outreach.  We got to experience first-hand the beauty of both Palestinian and Israeli culture.  Since we spent the bulk of our time in the West Bank, most of our experiences were in Arab daily life.  It was beyond life-changing. We never knew how truly beautiful the culture is… the hospitality, the food, the humor, the language, the importance of family and deep-rooted ties to the land.  We dove in head-first and did our best to integrate deep into the city and the culture. We were blessed to have been immediately welcomed into the community.  Hearing countless intimate stories of life on both sides of the wall, attending weddings and baptisms, worshipping every week with our Palestinian Christian brothers and sisters, learning ancient recipes from ALL the grandmas, eating the best food in the world in the most generous and beautiful homes, and walking every nook and cranny of the city. But best of all, formed life-long friendships  and became part of many families there.

For our work, I was mostly documenting the organization, making films and photos for marketing and storytelling and my wife was working with the youth doing art workshops, swim lessons, and collecting stories.

So many details left out and I really count go on and on for hours about our time there… but to get a little better idea of our day-to-day lives and the wonderful people we got to live and love with, you can visit our blog here, where we did some occasional updates: Living to Love

For photos on this post, I wanted to showcase a little bit of what life looks like there and what one might see if they were to visit: the people, the streets, the religious aspects, the countryside, the churches, the art, and images showcasing the complicated political situation.

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