I am standing in a field in North Belfast in the driving April rain, the mud sucking on my boots as I tramp around the muddy field trying to find the exact spot. It is very cold for late April. I am trying to locate the center of this field because this spot and the line running through it have considerable significance.

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This field, or more accurately the mid-line in this field is a Peace Line, one of those boundary markers in Northern Ireland, which are often invisible to the naked eye, that nevertheless divide the two communities. Sometimes the Peace Lines are large metal fences with differentiating graffiti on either side, but often they are not. It is hard to find this particular Peace Line there in the mud, but I can feel it. I know where I am.

Iris Close, West Belfast, 1997 -after construction

I stand looking down towards where I was born, where Legmore Street once stood at the turn of the road. Legmore Street was a slum but it was a mixed slum in those days. We were Protestant, but Joey Donaghy next door and the Rock family two doors up were Catholic. Roman Catholic we used to say then. Out of curiosity, I have examined the Belfast Street Registers for the years before the First World War and my grandfather is there in the street at the same number that I grew up in and Joey Donaghy's father was in the house next door even then.

They were both there for the work in the linen mills. Religion, I suppose, was always known and recognized but it was secondary to the work and it was the opportunities that this work provided that came first. We were all working class then first and foremost.

But things were to change. I remember as a teenager watching the burning houses further down towards the center of Belfast, in one of those streets that led from the Shankill to an area that I knew less well. Burning out, they called it. 'We're burning them out', they would say. We burnt out their lot, they burnt out ours. Then there was the intimidation. It almost sounds Northern Irish, these days.

It's got a local ring about it. Communities separated and divided as a result of this intimidation. Families left the area that they had lived in for generations. They moved house by house. There were no wagon trains like in Kosovo, just individual families getting out when they had to, with what they could gather around them. The Catholics at the bottom of the Ligoniel road moved to the top of the road, the Protestants at the top moved to the bottom. It was a distance of perhaps four hundred yards but that was all that was required to feel safe, to be with your own kind, to feel secure. Sometimes the intimidation was psychological, sometimes it was not. There have been more than 600 sectarian murders in North Belfast over the past thirty years.

After the streets became segregated you may have bumped into your old neighbors at the doctor's or the chemist's, but in few other places. Neighbors of a hundred years standing were separated by these little invisible lines in the road. You just didn't go there anymore unless you had to, you didn't normally cross the line. And when you did, when you really had to, it was all very brief-a few snatched words, the odd nod of recognition, no time for chit-chat.

Families that you once knew so well got on with the ordinary business of life, birth and death, without you knowing. My mother would get to hear that so-and-so had died and tell me. 'I never knew', I would say. 'How would you?'she would reply. 'I didn't hear for over a year afterwards and I grew up with her.'

This is, I suppose, what a divided community entails.

Now an organization called Habitat for Humanity wants to change all that. They want to build houses on this peace line, the one in that particular muddy field. And they want something else as well, they want the Protestants and the Catholics to build each other's houses. I mean literally build each other's houses using their own hands and their own toil. They even have a name for this, they call it 'sweat equity'. The house is sold at less than cost for about thirty thousand pounds, but each family has to put four hundred hours into the building work. This is the sweat equity calculated for each family.

They are currently working on a staunchly Protestant estate in Glencairn. This is just across Harmony Hill from Ligoniel. It is a name that will ring a bell with some people. It is where the Shankill Butchers, out to terrorise the terrorist in their words, dumped the butchered bodies of a number of their innocent Catholic victims.

Now, I am standing on a small hill at the back of a house listening to laughter rising into the air from down below. I can see brightly coloured balloons float off into the sky. It seems incongruous to hear laughter like that, here of all places. I watch a group of teenage girls carry a concrete beam across to the base of a house. I can hear American accents and more girlie laughter. These are volunteers young enough to have heard and read about the Shankill Butchers as history.

The organization of the building work on the site is surprising. They have only two full-time professional workers on the site Gerry Crossin and Vernon Toogood, the rest are all volunteers who have never done any building work before. Prayers are said at the start of work and at the end. A number of the timber framed houses are 'women build', only worked on by women.

The first Habitat for Humanity development in Northern Ireland was Iris Close near Beechmount in Catholic West Belfast. They built their first houses on some waste land that a builder had vacated, having been chased off by the local Republican paramilitaries. Habitat for Humanity moved in, building decent and affordable houses in this deprived area, practising the founder, Millard Fuller's philosophy of 'The Theology of the Hammer'. I talk to Rita Carson who has got a house in Iris Close. She tells me that she had never hammered a nail in before she worked on her own and her neighbors' houses. She invites me up to her house in Catholic West Belfast.

'But let me warn you', she says, 'it's a hard house to get out of.'

I ask her if this development is integrated (I use the term 'mixed'), but she looks at me with a little hurt in her eyes. 'God didn't put a label on my head saying Protestant or Catholic, you know.'

I go back to my vantage point at the top of the muddy hill, I stand there looking down towards Belfast Lough, I can see the yellow cranes of the Shipyard and beyond that on the side of a hill, I can just make Stormont out. I never realised that you could see it from here, somebody had to point it out to me.

I hear prayers starting in some strange and foreign tongue. Someone tells me that it's Swahili. I approach Peter who is leading the prayers. He is from Kenya and he is here in Glencairn with his wife and four young children. He tells me that he is in Belfast because he is a missionary, and that he has a debt to pay back to the country that in the past, produced so many missionaries for Africa.

I ask him if he is not worried about living on the Glencairn estate, but he tells me emphatically that he is not. He had been to Belfast before and during his training and now he has returned. 'They call me the Irishman in Kenya, you know', he says. He explains that church numbers are declining in Northern Ireland but rising in Kenya, he says that he wants to help start a revival here. His children standing in the sleet of Glencairn say that they miss their friends badly. 'But God's work needs to be done', says Peter.

Neither Iris Close nor the development in Glencairn is integrated. I find this out slowly over the course of the morning, slowly because nobody talks about Protestant or Catholic. 'Just labels', somebody else says. Work with both communities to establish simultaneous housing programmes in Ligoniel and Ballysillan has already started. The buffer zone separating the two communities provides the opportunity for a project that both communities can share in. This, I suppose, will be Habitat for Humanity's greatest challenge in Northern Ireland. To those who know the area it represents a considerable challenge but they have the backing of local community groups from both sides of the Peace Line. A lot of prayers are also being said for the project.

I leave this group laughing and joking in the cold driving rain and as I make my way to my car something happens. The sun quite dramatically breaks through the thick blanket of grey rain clouds. It is as sudden as that. Suddenly I am standing in warm Easter sun looking back at them. It is only a gap in the April showers, I know that, but it seems awfully symbolic that day. For some reason it just seems awfully symbolic.
-Geoffrey Beattie