Stories and ideas about being in harmony and at peace with Others.
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/09/queenie-liwat-campaigns-for-peace-in-north-cotabato/
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 …
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/08/kriz-cruzados-par-students-prepare-for-disasters/
This month we mark the completion of a nearly two year PeaceBuilders Community Inc. operation designed to enhance the disaster response capabilities of the Church in the Visayan Islands of the central Philippines. From small beginnings, this program really took off thanks to the enthusiastic participation of the Visayan pastors and the financial backing of …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/07/pbci-finalizes-par-drn-organizing-in-eastern-samar/
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/07/catherine-moreno-olitao-learning-and-teaching-at-coffee-for-peace/
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/05/one-pbci-volunteer-slain-five-new-par-monitors-commissioned/
Peacebuilders Community, Inc. was invited by Central Mindanao University (CMU) as consultant for Proposal Writing for Peace Process last April 28-29, 2015. The said activity was participated by selected professors who are members of Mt. Kalayo Institute for Social Enterprise Growth (MKESEG). CMU decided to have this kind of workshop because they believed that …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/04/cmu-starts-university-center-for-peace-and-reconciliation/
Engineering was Alkuino’s love from an early age, but his parents urged him to study agriculture so that he could take charge of the family farm. After earning his degree at the University of the Philippines Los Baños College of Agriculture, Alkuino dutifully returned to Valencia to cultivate corn. But when a seven-month drought caused the loss …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/03/brickmaking-ministry-part-1/
One of the most distressing calls for justice around the world today comes from the Indigenous voice. Amplified by the indignities suffered through historic theft and displacement of their life and land, their marginalization today is a story told to many but heard by few. As the world changes so must they, but how they …
Permanent link to this article: https://peacebuilderscommunity.org/2015/02/indigenous-rights-and-the-mennonites-from-panama-to-the-philippines/
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