The yoghurt-making ladies of Bethlehem

Meeting up with ‘the yoghurt-making ladies of Bethlehem’ felt a bit like doing a deal. Our friend Vivien Sansour, who was in London when we were in Bethlehem, WhatsApped the number of her friend Siham Kalibieh to our friend Raya Manaa, who was driving us around. Siham, we were told, would point us in the right direction. We met Siham by what felt like chance. We were meant to meet on a street corner on the outskirts of Bethlehem, but relying on Waze – our navigational tool of choice – was not always, we quickly found, entirely reliable. Sat nav, it turns out, can get just as confused as the next person trying to get its head around the geography of the area. We might be in what we thought of as Palestine as we drove around Bethlehem. Waze, on the other hand, rather than focusing in on any useful directions, just informed us that we were ‘entering an area of high risk’. The evidence, looking around us, bore no relation to the warning.