Monday, December 24, 2007 Editorial: Path of oneness
WRAPPING her lunch baon of yellow rice and halal (permissible) chicken in banana leaves was a practice that surely divided Muslim student Jalilah Mustapha from her Christian classmates.
At the Ramon Avanceña High School in Quiapo, Manila, where the Christians represent 55 percent of the student population, and the Muslims, 40 percent, tensions have long simmered, fueled by distrust of each other’s “strangeness,” a bias that has hardened into brittle intolerance.
Jalilah long knew that the Christians looked down openly on what she and her Muslim friends ate. But it took a while to sink in that the label of “dirty” food tied up with the Muslims’ “dirty” reputation as terrorists, a common prejudgment in campus.
This discrimination was all the more felt by Muslim students who noted that the school celebrated First Friday mass but did not set aside a place of worship for them.
A Christian, Trixia Tiñon criticized school authorities for accepting Muslim enrollees. Citing proliferating news reports of Muslim-instigated outbreaks of violence, Trixia said she and her fellow Christians feared and avoided the Muslims in their midst.
This was the situation in May 2006, when 15 Christian and 14 Muslim students from the Quiapo campus went on a five-day Peace Camp.
Making a difference
A documentation of the process before, during and after the camp is the focus of the “Dear Peace” video, written by two of the Ramon Avanceña students: Kaiser Jane Roeger and Diagandhi Datumanong.
The 33-minute testament was the highlight of the “Dear Peace” traveling exhibit conducted last Nov. 11-29. Seeking to spread the Peace Camp’s “Impressions of Conflict, Expressions of Peace,” the exhibit covered Cebu, Davao, Cagayan de Oro, Marawi and Cotabato.
The Visayas and Mindanao tours involved the CFA, Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines Episcopal Commission on Inter-religious Dialogue, National Council of Churches in the Philippines and the Young Moro Professionals.
But it is the young men and women, with their parents and teachers, who made this social experiment prove that “Christian and Muslim teenagers can make a difference together.”
In the reunion and organization of the speakers’ bureau made as follow-up to the Peace Camp, the youths expressed that, beyond their personal and religious differences, they realized they shared two important bonds: all are students, all are Filipinos.
One path
During the Peace Camp, the youths participated in workshops orienting them on writing essays and poetry, painting, performing theater arts, experimenting with photography and videography, creating music with indigenous instruments, and speaking to a public.
The “Dear Peace” footages show youths having fun while learning but also, more importantly, coaxing peace and creating, gesture by gesture, the bridges of coexistence.
Kaiser, who once found many Muslims conceited and hard to understand, found writing as catharsis: it enables honest expression of individuality but only after reflection and with respect for other people’s differences and rights.
Before his participation in the Peace Camp, Junaid Ibrahim used to study on his own because his Christian teammates would not mingle with him. There was no outright violence, he observed, but the indifference of the others was real and hard enough to cut.
During the music workshop, Junaid jammed with the former “others” in creating harmony from “strange” and “different” indigenous wooden and bamboo instruments, following a simple but meaningful tip from their musician-mentors: “sabay lang ang bagsak (listen to the others and time your striking in unison).”
As the “Dear Peace” video attests, “Walang daan patungo sa kapayapaan. Ang kapayapaan ang daan (there is no road to peace; there is only peace).”
