ELUSIVE PEACE

We are a society under constant siege-from crime and violence to an elusive peace that comes with material and spiritual poverty.Yet nothing compares with the nightmare of living in a town where rebels and soldiers clash,thrown into an arena carved by history and justice defined by an accumulation of old and new hurts. I write this remembering the vivid scene of clustered nipa huts in the town of Datu Odin Sinsuat where families who flee their conflict-ridden communities have sought temporary shelter. The children played, half-naked, while their parents milled around, while others eyed warily their camp's latest visitors.
The men spoke up. Their greatest fear is to come back to their real homes only to be forced to leave once again when caught in crossfire. In a region where men are married to their guns, trust is as elusive as peace.
The dialogue was open ,free-wheeling and quite revealing.On the side of the local leaders, the concerns were common and urgent peace agreement, would they , the ARMM officials , once again be shunted to the margins as invisible stakeholders?
We all have our daily bottles to fight , our own family struggles to deal with. Still ,we who have it much better than the families living in tiny huts far from their real abodes ,we who only have to walk a few feet to reach for and open the refrigerator door for food and water, and we who have the luxury of knowing that we will be able to go home anytime and every time we want to ,must realize that such blessings are too precious to ignore.We all need to pray for elusive peace to come and roost in the hinterlands of Mindanao. Let us not leave them to fight their lonely battles, in isolation from the rest of the nation. Each soldier killed , each child recruited as a rebel soldier, and every orphan with anger in his or her heart diminishes us as one people , one country, regardless of how and to whom we pray.