I arrived today in the English town of Colchester, east of London, to pick up the Dale Farm trail. As AP’s readers will know, Dale Farm is a large community of Irish Travellers in the United Kingdom who face eviction. The site lies about 45 minutes from Colchester.

Our partner organization, the Dale Farm Housing Association, has asked us to recruit a Peace Fellow, and we’re lucky to have received an application from James Dasinger, an American student from California who has a long-standing interest in Travellers and Gypsies.

James has bravely taken several months off from college to go off and live in a caravan at Dale Farm. He arrived in the UK yesterday. I’ve come over to help him move in. The next two weeks will be critically important for Dale Farm. On February 11, the British High Court will hear their appeal.

Last time I was here, 18 months ago, I accompanied Grattan Puxon, one of the Travellers’ most effective local advocates, to the nearby village of Hove Fields, which provides a foretaste of what could lie ahead for Dale Farm. We toured several former homes which had been bulldozed by Constant & Co, the company that has been contracted to carry out an eviction at Dale Farm.

Constant is notorious for the violence of its eviction methods, which resemble Israeli house demolitions. The former Traveller homes at Hove Fields were now festering open pits, full of foul-smelling water, shattered concrete and electrical wires which posed a clear health hazard to children. The local council, which bills itself as a champion of conservation, had made no effort to clean up.

We were accompanied by Jon Austin, a friendly, pink-faced reporter from the local paper, the Basildon Echo. Jon has the “Traveller beat” on the Echo and has won prizes for his coverage, although he has a reputation for duplicity among the Travellers.

Jon certainly surprised me. I remember how he kept asking me for quotes, even though I didn’t see too many notes being taken. Two weeks later I was at a hotel in Jerusalem when the phone rang. It was the BBC asking for an interview. Apparently the Sunday Express – a large British tabloid – had picked up Jon’s article about our visit to Hove Fields and wanted to know why I had accused the British government of ethnic cleansing. I didn’t remember saying that, but I suppose it goes with the territory.

A lot has happened since. Last summer, AP recruited our first Peace Fellow for Dale Farm. Zach Scott, from Georgetown University, lived in a caravan during the summer and became such an effective – and controversial – advocate for the Travellers that his departure warranted a news story in the Basildon Echo.

Zach’s blogs also provoked some abusive and racist comments from angry locals, wanting to know how Americans of all people could presume to come over to Britain and preach human rights.

The answer is that we haven’t seen too many people lining up in Britain to help the Travellers make their case. In fact, the Dale Farm Travellers are probably the most friendless of all the 30 community groups we work with around the world. At least they will soon have their moment in court – the British High Court, to be precise. Our job is to help.

This afternoon, I met up with James, our new Dale Farm Peace Fellow. The two of us are spending two nights at the Globe Hotel, in Colchester. The hotel is owned by an Indian family and my room is cleaned by a young women from Latvia. This seems to reflect favourably on racial diversity in Britain.

So why are the Travellers, most of whom were born in the UK and are British citizens, so shunned and detested?