Author's posts
The other night I dreamed of deep, still water with dense shoals of squid jetting aimlessly through its depths. My boat glided above the rose-colored mollusks as I netted them up by the dozen. I diced them into a heap of rings and curly tentacles, and stir-fried them in garlic and soy sauce, but before …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2016/04/frani-catua-cooks-for-peace/
In a cinderblock-walled courtyard half shaded by palm and balete trees, in the quiet Davao City subdivision of Juna, stands the industrial array of Coffee For Peace (CFP). Bamboo drying frames and stacks of hard plastic tubs flank locally fabricated de-pulper and roaster machines. Close by are tables for sorting beans and, in an adjoining …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2016/03/kuya-fred-is-a-friend-to-mindanaos-farmers/
Queenilyn Liwat grew up listening for gunfire. In her hometown of Banisilan, North Cotabato, she and her friends learned from an early age how to survive in a warzone. “Whenever there are gunshots, even if we are afraid, we have to be brave and alert, or else we will die like the others. There’s only …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/09/queenie-liwat-campaigns-for-peace-in-north-cotabato/
The drenched and shivering young woman cast her eyes frantically back and forth over the beach where the rescue volunteers had laid her down after pulling her from the breakers. “Where’s my mother?” she sobbed, “Oh, help! Someone, please find my mother!” She cried so piteously that one of the rescuers momentarily forgot all her …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/08/kriz-cruzado-mentors-rescuers-servants/
In 2009, when she had worked for two years at the Davao City café operated by Coffee For Peace (CFP), Catherine Moreno Olitao received the offer of a job in Cotabato City, on the opposite coast of the island of Mindanao. The offer came from a Moro lady of importance named Bai Jehan Baraguir, whose …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/08/a-cfp-baristas-interfaith-friendships/
Last week, in the Davao City offices of PeaceBuilders Community, Inc. (PBCI), Kriz Cruzado and her assistant were revising field reports, sorting and transcribing receipts (“liquidating funds” in the Filipino English usage), and tying up the hundred loose ends of a nearly two year PBCI operation in the Visayan island region – a project which …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/08/kriz-cruzados-par-students-prepare-for-disasters/
Longtime Coffee For Peace (CFP) barista Catherine Moreno Olitao wants the Philippines’ small farmers to hold onto their land. She sees how the modern, globalized economy squeezes the life out of traditional family based agriculture, pressuring poor rural folk to cash out and move to the city. Catherine’s farmer relatives live under this strain, and …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/07/catherine-moreno-olitao-learning-and-teaching-at-coffee-for-peace/
At the close of 2007, young Rassiere Ramos was near to despairing. Unable to pay his college tuition, he had recently been forced to drop out. Rassiere’s family had always been poor. He and his three siblings all longed to earn college degrees and find professional employment so as to help their parents. But the …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/07/peacebuilder-profile-rassiere-ramos/
Young Jun Aparece pricked up his ears when Bobby Alonto began to tune the guitar. In the Muslim dormitory, on Mindanao State University’s main campus, Alonto and his brothers were about to launch into a chorus lauding their Moro people’s age-old, ongoing struggle for self-rule. It was the early 1980s, and nearly two decades of dictator Ferdinand …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/06/moro-autonomy-a-mindanaoan-christians-thirty-year-advocacy/
During the final years of the Martial Law era in the Philippines, massive dissatisfaction with President Marcos’s brutal dictatorship prompted thousands of idealistic young Filipinos to align themselves with the Philippines’ various rebel fronts. Most joined up with the leftist revolutionaries of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), the New People’s Army (NPA), and …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/06/hard-lessons-of-the-purge/
For the last seven years, Mindanaoan acitivist Jun Aparece has given great service to PeaceBuilders Community, Inc. as a partner and consultant. To our shared tasks of grassroots organizing, rallying Mindanaoan communities for anti-war demonstrations, and broadcasting the cries of war-weary Mindanaoan civilians to their countrymen throughout the Philippines and to lawmakers in Manila, Aparece …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/06/jun-aparece-activist-missionary-agitator-and-peacebuilder/
For more than two decades, an indigenous southern Philippine tribe, the Dulangan Manobo of Sultan Kudarat Province, have reportedly been harassed, intimidated, and forced to struggle for the right to live and to practice their livelihoods within their own ancestral territory. Since 1992, when government contracts placed much of the Dulangan Manobo territory under the control of …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/05/one-pbci-volunteer-slain-five-new-par-monitors-commissioned/
