Like many of us civilians here, early in my life I admired the life of a soldier.

As a little boy, I enjoyed my war toys at Christmas. I did mock wars with my little plastic toy soldiers, with the battery-powered tanks and the toy Armalite. Later, I enjoyed baril-barilan with the neighborhood boys, eventually graduating into a war with slingshots against boys in the next village, the open ground between both villages becoming our battlefield. We even tied a poor boy, our prisoner of war, to a post all afternoon for all his friends to see, until their leader came to negotiate for his release.

(Delivered on November 12, 2009 in Davao City, at the conference of the Mindanao Working Group).

I am happy to be here and more so because I am excited to share with you the exciting things happening inside the GRP-MILF peace process. If you asked me a month ago whether there will be significant movement within the remaining period, I would have said, “not much”. But as a participant in the negotiations for the past four weeks, I am energized. I see a lot of reasons to be optimistic and excited.

(posted by the author in her blog, http://iyaliya.wordpress.com/ late evening of 30 June. Permission to re-publish this granted to MindaNews by the author)

A few days ago, mom told me about an activity in Mindanao. She said that journalists from Manila and journalists from Mindanao will gather together to do a coverage on the situation of the evacuees. Sans Mama, they will be visiting evacuation sites. There will also be meetings and open forums with the Military and MILF.

NORTH COTABATO (MindaNews/24 May) -- I would like, first of all, to thank everyone of the 19 brave souls who participated in the hastily-convened and planned Study Mission (May 17-19) designed firstly to verify reports of indiscriminate bombings of Teduray communities in Barangay Ahan in Guindulungan, Maguindanao.

The Mission objective was broadened to look into the situation of internally displaced persons in Maguindanao and to document incidences of human rights violations as well as to try to find means of responding to the needs of IDPs.

They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace—Jeremiah 6:14
DATU PIANG, Maguindanao (MindaNews/15 April) -- Here at last is the ‘bakwit’ country. Just like the name of the first village entering this long stretch of depressed humanity called Barangay Salvo,  where one would be greeted with a barrage of worn-out hopes from faces not keenly captured in airwaves and podcasts, either in recycled newspapers or in picture messages from high-end mobile phones. Here is the country that denies the scrapping of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain by the Supreme Court. Here the MOA-AD is alive and felt among the hearts and minds of the Bangsamoro. Here is the country that tells the very meaning of internal displacement even when government social welfare agencies have tried to obfuscate their existence.