it's not the end of the world. but it wouldn't take much convincing for me to start considering it.

it all started in a small apartment in jerusalem one sunday night when our internet goes down. the next night one of our cameras breaks. and the next day during the first interview we find that one of the mic inputs on the one "good" camera is broken. our monitor falls off its stand while we were praying for God to protect the equipment. one of our people forgets to show up for the interview. one of our other people is sick during his interview. joel is up the entire night before with his sick daughter rachel who later passes the stomach flue to joel's entire family in consecutive order. our interview for friday is canceled because he gets sick. our interview for saturday is canceled because joel gets sick. and we had planned for an interview tomorrow, but joel called a little bit ago with a relapse of the flue and is sick again.

now, it sounds like a lot of bad, and of course, there is nothing good about the stomach flue, but this week hasn't been all bad. though, because of the jewish holidays the internet people weren't able to come until today (a week later from when we lost internet initially). oh well, not having internet isn't necessarily bad.

on the good side, today joel, scott and i went up on the temple mount with our small camera and got some disturbing footage. during our interview with gabriel barkay several days prior he told us that there was a desecration on the temple mount in which the muslims were digging a trench for some power lines to their new mosque. the issue at hand is that the temple mount soil is so rich in antiquities yet, no archaeologist has every touched a spade to it because it's controlled by the muslims. but never the less, the muslims are digging a trench with back hoes and other equipment without doing real archaeological excavation. the temple mount is made up of a series of destruction layers of human settlements throughout time and they are being horribly disturbed by the destruction currently taking place. barkay painfully recalled in his interview seeing ancient pottery and antiquities being ripped from the ground and destroyed by heavy digging equipment. so us with our little inconspicuous camera made our way to the dig sites on the temple mount to document this atrocity as best we could. after gathering severel minutes of footage we made our way back home and edited together a short mini documentary about the current affair. gabriel barkay and many other archaeologists have recently appealed to the israeli government to stop the digging on the temple mount. and based on what we saw today, it would appear that so far, they have been unsuccessful.

i don't know if that last paragraph made clear sense but i embedded the short documentary below this journal entry here on filmsandfaces so you can see it for yourself.

so that's all. pray for us if you think about it. thanks, love to you.