Paul Calvert spoke with Julia Michelle Dabdoub from the Arab Women's Union about their museum, an archaeological find and how they have helped local families for over 60 years.

Julia: The women, we are very conservative, we like that the woman keeps her home, especially when she doesn't have the facility of having maids, so she has to take care of her home, her cooking, her children and even her in-laws. Most of the families used to live with the father and mother. We thought that while the women are among their family, in their pleasure time they can embroider. So every day, every week, they come here. First of all we teach them and then we give them quantity of embroidery and they can disappear for one month, or two weeks, or two months. It depends how much we give them work. They do it in their homes. When they come back it depends on how much material and how much thread they use; we pay them by balls of thread.

We used to have 250, when we used to be able to go and make exhibitions in Amman or Kuwait. Now we are nearly surrounded by a wall in Bethlehem, so to go out we need a permit and to go out in Jordan we need to go through very narrow roads and a very long way. To pass, it is about one hour and 15 minutes to Amman, but for us it can be six-seven hours to reach, so we don't go any more to make exhibits outside Bethlehem. We have now, around 100 women working. We have some tourists and we export the embroidery, but our aim is to copy the traditional embroidery, the traditional colours and the traditional designs. We want to keep our history and tradition.

Paul: In keeping with the history, you have two traditional houses in Bethlehem. What sort of things would you find in these two houses?

Julia: You go in through the first part and it's like entering a house 100 years ago. The cushions, carpets, brass, kitchen and photographs, most of them are older than 70 or 80 years. We have a big kitchen where we have all the utensils that are not used anymore. Most of them are in brass and are beautiful big pots. Then we have a room where we expose the dresses and jewels. One of the rooms, which was built at the end of the 19th Century, which is the period where people started to copy Europe, there is a brass bed and nice bed cover with European embroidery and some photographs. This is where it shows the people in Bethlehem from 1900 to 1932.

Paul: Do you have a well in the kitchen?

Julia: Yes we have two wells. One in the kitchen and one outside the house. A well is the most important thing in the house. Before building a house, they used to care for the well, which they are not doing any more. Lack of water is a problem, we have problems all year and people sometimes stay one week without water. If I was Mayor of Bethlehem, or any place, I would not give a permit of building without obliging to make a well. A well is so important. Sometimes we have rain for the whole day where you can fill a well. It's a pity that this water is lost like this. Even in Israel they are suffering a lack of water, because they use more than us; you know with gardens and swimming pools and all the luxury that we are not really having.

Paul: Jesus was born here in Bethlehem and his father Joseph was from here as well. What would houses have been like in Bethlehem then?

Julia: The house that we have, I am sure it is the same style of house. It may be very old, we have no age of this house. We bought it off an old lady and she lived there all alone. There was a special part, which is one room hewn in the rock, where the domestic animals live and on top of it there is room where the family live. Later, the room that I was telling you about, which was a bit European, this was the end of the 19th Century, people started sleeping on a bed and not on the floor, or sitting on a chair, as you would be in this room. So in Jesus time the animals would be at the bottom and then high above would be the family and they'd get all the heat from the animals.

Paul: You have a museum of the history of the city of Bethlehem. When was that started?

Julia: In 1972. We had both this house where we are now; this is where we ended by having these children coming for lunch every day, because it is in the centre near the nativity and most of the schools are around, the Franciscan, the St Josephs and the Government schools. The children used to come on foot, but the path they came on was abandoned. One day I told the lady, "Why don't we restore it and collect old things that our children and grandchildren will never see?" And it was an excitement. They started naming things, like jars, cupboards where they kept corn, or dried figs and things that are not found any more and we don't know about. So the excitement came, so we went to the houses in Bethlehem and in each house we told them what we are going to do. They gave us what they had and they said, "You should have come before, because I had this salt and I threw it away, or I gave it to the wash woman."

So we took whatever they gave us and we put it here and each object we have is written in the name of the donor and the age. After a few years, people started calling it the museum, because we just called it our old Bethlehem home. We didn't think of a museum. It was just to expose whatever we had.

Then in 1982 a French person came to Jerusalem to restore the Islamic Museum. At that time I asked the French Consulate General if he could lend us this person to re-construct the objects. She came and we continued, so now everything is the same and nothing was damaged. It's now 42 years and every object we took, every day we open, the dust is cleaned as if it is a real home, so we are very lucky to have every object that stayed in its place.

Paul: You found an archaeological site underneath the museum. What happened and how did you find it?

Julia: We don't have any archaeology here. In another building we have, which is facing the Jacir Palace Intercontinental Hotel, we started building another museum that will specialise in the history of the city of Bethlehem. This is different. There you have mostly books written by Bethlehem people and old magazines, journals, and a lot of photographs. It will be the culture of the people, it has nothing to do with objects.