Here is my good friend Lito again. This time his questioning mind wanders into the shores of Samal Island. His left foot, he said, got caught in a heap of trash that bore the marks of a sad incident that occurred a couple of days past. The houses of long longtime residents of a fraction of foreshore land in the Garden city were “demolished without mercy” [Wala gyuy ku-kaluoy nga gipangguba,] he said.
The document written by Pope Francis of the Catholic Church, entitled Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) is a very heartening development in the citadel of Christianity—the Catholic church.
Around a week ago, when the reports of the Talaingod Manobo exodus first began trickling in, I happened to glance at a copy of a Mindanao regional daily at a local cafe. The front page proudly bannered that two battalions had been brought in from Luzon to add to counter-insurgency operations here in the Davao region. In my gut, I knew that this happy headline had something to do with the misery of my friends and many others in Talaingod.
LITO: While waiting for the outcome, don’t you think it is also good to hold peace talks between the NPA rebels and the Government?
As schools across the country are holding commencement exercises, schoolchildren from Barangay Palma Gil in Talaingod, Davao del Norte would be trudging, instead of marching, and going not up a stage to be applauded, but down from their mountain communities. In the process they have earned a new title - not graduates, but bakwit, evacuees, the displaced.