While painting and ordering children about at the SOS village, I Met Yazer, a 19-year-old lad, from Dheishah refugee camp. He expressed enthusiasm (in a mixture of Arabic and English) in helping with the mural and seemed to have a good eye for colour.

He invited me to Dheishah camp, where I discovered he was a prolific mural and sign artist in the camp. An international group had even spotted his work and his work made into a calendar.

Over mint tea he showed me some drawings, stored under the sofa to protect them from his younger siblings. He showed me a mirror etching he had made - scripture from the Qu'ran, scratched in with a screw. Yaser showed me the design for his next engraving - Ahmad Yassin, the recently deceased Hamas leader from Gaza.

We moved on to visit his friend Ahmad. His living room was a shrine to his craft - made from bark, car springs, dried plants and stones (or whatever he laid his hands on). On many of his creations, he had written scripture from the Qu'ran.

On the wall there were two decorative hearts with 'love' written on them in Arabic. "These were made by my brother in law when he was in prison for two years for fighting the Israeli soldiers," says Ahmad.

Ahmad's two-year-old daughter came into the room. She had recently become deaf for some inexplicable reason and had to wear hearing aids in each ear.

Ahmad brought out many of the beautiful clothes he had made for his daughter. She smiled and fondled them excitedly. "I like to make her all these clothes so people are distracted from her being deaf."

Paul Gent