Category Archives: Maggie

So I’m sitting on the floor at Gate 10 in the Manila Airport, my bag much heavier now than upon arrival due to all the packets and readings materials all our hosts gave us over the two weeks. I think my high school English teachers would appreciate my need to make that into a metaphor for how much heavier my brain also feels after all the work we’ve done.  The last leg of the trip was really a challenge: between the lack of sleep, hot humid weather, long days and the constant struggle to stay hydrated, morning conversations between Evyn and me in the last couple of days disintegrated into either giggles or whines. I found myself day dreaming about Mexican food and Netflix, about sleeping in my own bed. But of course now that I’m in the airport, about to leave the Philippines for the foreseeable future, I kind of don’t want to leave.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not just because of the pre-semester jitters.  But I’ve spent the last two weeks head-to-toe immersed in nothing but Mindanao and the Mindanao conflict, talking about the implementation of the Bangsamoro Basic Law, women’s rights and political participation, the New People’s Army, tri-people, rido, and international mining companies. Even during our meals, if we didn’t have a dinner meeting, we would ask clarifying questions to James or at least make small talk about what interesting cultural difference we’d experienced that day.  In all honesty, I’m not sure if I’m ready to think about other subjects.  Other than classes, I have preparations for work to start back up next week, a friend visiting from Spain in March, and all these other tasks coming up that are worlds away and simply don’t fit into my Mindanao mentality.  In the short time I’ve been here I’ve normalized the schedule, the information, the food, and the weather of our time in Mindanao, and now it’s over as suddenly as it began.

But of course the work doesn’t end.  As I spoke to briefly in my past blog post (as I’m sure others have in theirs) we’ll be continuing with this information well into the spring semester.  Even though I’m out of Mindanao, I’ll keep posting, so keep checking to see more details about the conflict and how we end up processing all of what we saw, including more of the nitty-gritty and meat of the topics. I’m thinking the next post will probably be more in depth about my area of interest– the zones of peace– so watch out!

Guess which gate was mine? 

[Written January 19]

We’re back in Davao for the end of our trip, staying in the same hotel as the first couple of nights, and it’s a very strange feeling because remembering that feels like a century ago.  We have traveled all across the island at this point, and even stayed briefly on Samal island last night to have a day of swimming on the beach and allowing our brains to melt a little bit.  It’s hard to describe all the ways in which I’ve changed in just two weeks, but I know that my eyes have been opened a little more to the Mindanao conflict.  I’ve sat down and calculated, so here’s the rundown of our two jam-packed weeks spent here:

We’ve had meetings with 22 groups of various actors, including civil society organizations, NGOs both local and international, a military branch, religious leaders and organizations, and villages.  We’ve stayed in 7 different hotels which I can barely remember, except for where we saw the biggest cockroaches and where the best (or worst) food was. We’ve tried durian and mangosteen, and eaten pounds upon pounds of mango, watermelon, pineapple, bananas – not to mention some of those bananas were boiled.  We’ve spent at least 26 hours in debrief sessions within our own group, reviewing, absorbing, and processing all the information that we’ve accumulated.  And, of course, having needed to go all across the island, we’ve spent about 40 hours riding in our cramped white van with a trusted and talented driver who could give the Queen’s Guard a run for their money, because none of our group could get him to talk.

For tonight, we’re going to our departure dinner with CRS, and tomorrow morning we’ll have our final meeting with them to present everything that we’ve learned.  What has been floating around in my head is the question that two CRS staff members have apparently asked Dr. Iyer for the conclusion of our trip: how are we relating this trip with our studies? Are we applying what we’ve learned to the trip, or is the trip going to inspire or be a part of future projects and courses?  I knew upon registering for the course that we’d be coming back to Monterey to share the stories that we’d heard while traveling here, that we’d have to do something with all the information we’d gathered. But beyond that, I hadn’t really thought in detail about what I wanted to do with this experience. Sure I want to use it for background and context as I continue my studies, but is that it?

I’ll have to keep thinking on those questions to fully be able to answer them, but I’ll try to siphon through where I’m at now.  I thoroughly enjoyed this experience.  I enjoyed getting a glimpse of one conflict from all different and human perspectives; I enjoyed trying my hand at the art of questioning and researching; of feeling myself grow and improve, and of tasting what it might be like “in the field”.  Lastly, of course, I really loved being out of the US again, and sharing the course with my group.  We’ve  undergone changes in our dynamics and it’s really incredible to see how the first day has differed from our more recent meetings. I think at this point, the best way to take advantage of this experience here on out is make sure that I don’t forget what I’ve learned here, to share the stories we’ve heard, and to keep those changes present in my mind as much as possible to remind me that there is a lot to be done in Conflict Resolution, and hopefully I can contribute a little.

[Written January 17]

Traveling to various cities in Central Mindanao, we’ve been having the opportunities to talk with a few different organizations that represent the IPs of Mindanao – that is, the Indigenous Peoples (pronounced here as Ind-eye-genous) or the Lumads.  Whether in their own exclusive communities or as a part of a tri-people barangay (Settlers/Christians, Moros/Muslims, and IPs), we heard stories of political exclusion, extreme poverty, and lower education rates alongside rich and proud cultural customs and traditions.

It was difficult for me to sit and listen to various organizations and barangay officials talk about how the Lumads have representation in their local governments to represent while the Lumad communities would express concerns for recognition of their rights, particularly what they call Ancestral Domain, which is their claim to lands that were theirs before the Moros and before the Christians settled in the areas. The story of Ancestral Domain is one of contradicting land titles and disputes, but what struck me most about the conversations we heard was that there was some conversation that needs to happen, that simply hasn’t yet.

There’s no way that, after such a short time learning about Ancestral Domain, I could suggest what that missing conversation is.  What I do know, however, is that while many Moros referred to themselves also as indigenous, the IPs we met responded with a clearly negative answer when we brought up the same definition to them.  Maybe this has to do with increasing legitimacy to land ownership, maybe it has to do, as so many have talked about, showing respect to one marginalized group or the other (because both the Moros and the IPs have a history in Mindanao of marginalization). Regardless, it was one of many examples that demonstrated just how differently various people we met saw the problems in Mindanao.

The reason the Lumads caught my attention so strongly is probably because I felt like I had heard this story before, time and time again.  Tribal people across the globe face challenges like those of the Lumads— specifically I have learned about a number of Native America tribes in the US, and the Mapuches in Chile and Easter Island.  While there is a rhetoric of respecting the people who are native to a place long before the settlers, the colonists, etc. arrived, the manifestation of such homages and reverence in mainstream cultures comes in the forms of casinos, tourist trinkets or attractions, or headdresses and Pocahontas garb as fashionable. There still seems to remain a gap– at least from my perspective— on enacting that respect in any socially- or economically-developmental manner, both in the story of Mindanao and around the world.

A Lumad display at a high-end restaurant with a view overlooking the city of Davao.

[Written Jan. 10 2015]

At the end of our first full day in Davao, the capital city on the island of Mindanao, and in one word I’d have to describe it as: overwhelming. After stepping off a plane for the first time in over 24 hours, I found myself surrounded by people yelling and car horns honking, the smells of pollution and food being cooked on the street, the blazing heat of the sun as early as7:30am, and the Technicolor palate of the buildings surrounded by the green of palm trees and other vegetation. And it didn’t stop there: as soon as we left the city, we passed rural landscapes painted with mountains, forests, and farms, where the air was heavy with the humidity and the smell of coconut.

What has been so much fun since then, for the past couple of days, has been deciphering the language of Tagalog. Many signs on the street are written in English, or a combination of English and Tagalog, and there are a plethora of Spanish and English words used in the language. So even though I arrived with just a single page of common words and phrases, I have been able to understand bits and pieces of what I hear or read while we’re here. We speak with lots of people who work in NGOs, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), and government agencies, so they all have fairly advanced levels of spoken English, but when we speak with various people from the villages or smaller groups we need to translate back and forth.  Then it is so exciting for me to be able to put the pieces together as I listen to the Tagalog and try to put the ideas together before I hear the translated version.

Words such as sige (“go ahead” or “continue”), iglesia (“church”), gusto (like, as in “I like…”) and ¿kumusta ka? (“how are you?”), resemble the Spanish equivalents of sigue, iglesia, gustar and ¿Cómo estás? But the real meat of the language that we’ve encountered lies in the words that I don’t recognize at all. Along our trip so far I’ve tried to gather a sort of vocabulary list, many of which are of course products of the topics about which we’ve been conducting our research. I’m putting a disclaimer here now that some of these words I only heard, and didn’t see written down, so it’s possible that my spelling is slightly atrocious. But Tagalog seems to be a phonetic language like Spanish, so just read it as it appears and we should be fine.

Not unexpectedly, the first word we all learned and have tried to use is salamat, or thank you, and if we want to express more cordiality we could say daghang salamat (thanks very much) or even sukran (many thanks). Today when we were discussing the zones of peace and various Culture of Peace workshops that have been conducted, I learned Mesa ng kapayapaan, or peace table, a physical table where people are supposed to come together to resolve their conflicts and shakes hands, rather than allow it to escalate or resort to violence. A few days ago we learned about the terms balikIslam and balikLumad, which literally translated mean to return to Islam or Lumad (the Indigenous Peoples), but are used to mean people who have converted to these religions. Then there are words like sokoan, meaning “concern for others”, or kobatan, which is a place where war has been. Lastly, in a conversation about the inter-religious dialogues that have taken place in recent years, we learned that, the word “forgiveness” translates slightly differently in three of the local languages: Tagalog, Cebuano, and one of the northern dialects. In Tagalog, the word patawan literally means bargaining; in Cebuano, pasailo means contract; and in the north, bakawan means erase.

I know there’s no way for me to learn the language in the two weeks that I’m here, and that’s not even though that’s not the purpose of this trip, but I still love to do it. As evidenced by the various words for “forgiveness”, it really can reveal some of the diversities and limitations of translation. In a context that is as multilingual as the island of Mindanao, again I think the best word to describe the experience, at least in English, is overwhelming.