What can I say but Jenin rips out your heart and breaks it...this place is full of contrasts and amazing people but is so hard to deal with emotionally.

Jenin is up North in the West Bank and very cut off from the rest of it, access is via several IDF checkpoints and it feels tense.

We are welcomed into a family house initially, we are eating and making jokes about our Matt as he is so slim and we joke to the man of the house (he is young and slim) about how slim he is; he explains its because he was shot...shit clown humour slightly off he mark again.

The family are lovely and feed us well, we are all in the same room together and during the second night are woken by the sound of gunshots and grenades nearby. Not a good nights sleep, but for the family woken at 3 in the morning and turfed out of their house it must have been horrific. The next day Matt scanned the internet for news of the raid and only found two lines of text on an obscure website.

That’s one of the major problems here – the media! All we tend to see on major news reports is the bad stuff, normal lives just aren’t glamorous enough??? And Palestinians being shot and wounded on a regular basis just don’t make it to our eyes and ears.

Although the Middle East is always portrayed as a hot bed of unrest and fanatics most of the people we encounter are just trying to live their lives peacefully and send their kids to school and then work like any other people throughout most of the world.

The idea that people here are so used to war and death than when its happens is doesn’t matter is extreme misinformation, that’s just sick, families here love each other infinitely, and dead children hurt beyond belief...on either side of the conflict.

What does your head in most here is working with such lively, talented positive kids and then realising that so many may end up as future martyrs, whose posters adorn most of the walls and shop front shutters in this town.

If you want to find out more about this place, the best way is to watch the film Arna's Children available from thefreedomtheatre.org It graphically portrays how ordinary people become "terrorists" and how in conditions like these its so normal for that to happen.

Our shows work well and the kids from the Street Circus here enjoy 3 days of workshops and contact with clowns from the outside world. Circus lifts spirits and gives people a positive activity to fill their time with...it really does work. Since last year more groups have sprung to life and on both sides of the wall – it’s becoming a really alternative activity... I just hope it spreads quickly and that the sides unite in their youthful vocation enough o make a real difference in the future.

All the young Israelis that we have met do not want the wall and many are very active in their opposition to it...Vive Le Future!!!!