Lanao del Sur. Three months after the siege, there’s an overpowering sense of gloom and frustration as paper and plastic cover the windows inside the teacher’s lounge of a small elementary school. Its occupants are Marawi siege survivors who want to keep the light out. They don’t feel well and spend the entire day on the dusty cold cement floor that’s littered with their trash. They rarely get up to move around and just wait, oblivious to their children’s shouting and fighting.[]/a> with []/a> with |||
These are the stories of the volunteers:
Kim: “It was probably the first time in their three months of living together in the selter that the evacuees noticed their dirty feet and were embarrassed to let us wash them.”
Audi: “The children were so stiff and shy at first. But by the time we left, they’d loosened up greatly and knew all our names.”
Imad: “The therapies, patients said, made them feel better. They said that despite their pitiful situation, they felt respected as human beings.”
Suli: “Many patients have told me this is the first time they feel volunteers really care because usually volunteers just take pictures, distribute the food packages, then go.”
Bane: “One girl almost had surgery hadn’t our medical team been there and ruled it out after they discovered that there was instead parasitic infection in her digestive system.”
Mal: “One woman was so grateful for my body talk access session that she told me to stop even before I was finished because she was concerned that I may be tired.”
Aliyah: “A day or two after the first consultations and therapies, patients were moving around more and doing chores.”
Actual relief work is nothing like what they’re taught in school though, according to the Courageous Marawi 6. They only realize now, for instance, that relief thought to be empowering may actually really be debilitating.
For instance, evacuees who have been sleeping on cement floor for months have become stiff and rigid from the cold. To help them ease their pains, the CSW team considered cutting some bamboo growing nearby and making them into raised beds. Yet they couldn’t pursue this plan because there were other questions: Who do we ask permission from to cut the bamboo? Who will pay for it? Who will build the beds? And who of all the thousands of sick people should we give the beds to? Imad explains,“If we’re not careful, we could appear abrasive and divisive instead of providing just and fair solutions.”
At the end of this first Creating Sinag Within mission, the team gathered to assess their experience. The unanimous decision: re-group and return in one month to provide patients with follow-up sessions.
The CSW volunteers also strongly feel it’ll be good for the country that government agencies and relief organizations involved in rehabilitating Marawi meet and compare experiences and best practices to learn from each other. Do we relief workers have a genuine desire to help or are we here just to fulfill our need to help? Do the kind and quality of our relief treat evacuees as human beings, not their sicknesses? We certainly don’t want a relief effort to be “cold” and interested only in fulfilling its own agenda, do we? We are rebuilding people, not buildings after all.
***Origin of Kids for Peace
At 12 years old, Rosan Aliya Agbon started Kids for Peace. This was around 2000 during the All Out War by former President Joseph Ejercito “Erap” Estrada. She saw two fighter planes ready to drop bombs. At first she was happy but then she realized the bombs can kill anyone. So she wrote an open letter to ask for peace messages and to make evacuees know that there are people who care. This letter was then emailed by her mother and it was read at a radio station. The first person to respond was a soldier. He gave PhP 500 as his contribution. Soon more contributions poured in from Australia, America, New Zealand, and Germany. They were art supplies and drawings which Aliyah brought and gave to the evacuees in provinces near Cotabato City. To make her increasingly popular initiative official, Aliyah named it Kids for Peace and registered it with SEC. This is how her journey of officially helping others began.
Author’s note: Creating Sinag Within’s Mission 1 in August 2017 and Mission 2 in October 2017 were both initiated by Kids for Peace Foundation, Inc. with support from teachers of Steiner/Waldorf schools in Luzon and in Mindanao and from health workers from various community managed primary health programs in Digos City, Kidapawan City, and Arakan, North Cotabato. College graduates from Tawi-Tawi, Iligan, Cagayan, and Marawi also volunteered during the two Creating Sinag Within missions despite being siege survivors themselves.
They felt a compelling need to leave their families, put their job searching on hold, and help out in evacuation centers. For more information about how to support the next activities of Creating Sinag Within, visitfacebook.com/creatingsinagwithinor contact the Founder and Director, Rosan Aliya Agbon at creatingsinagwithin@gmail.com.
