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PHOTOS
JOREM CATILO
And that’s what brought us there
that morning. This village wasn’t an
example of the tragedies in the world.
We were there to witness how people
can come together — how they’ve
been coming together for many years,
thankfully — and how they’ve begun to
find ways to make things better.
This community was a great
example. Just four years back, these
villagers were living in abject terror,
fleeing rebel troops who were razing
settlements and executing civilians. As
we sat in the hut that served as their
community hall, some of them spoke
about being held hostage by the MILF,
used as human shields against the
M A K I N G A D I F F E R E N C E
IT WAS NOT EVEN NOON
on a Saturday morning and
I’d already been on a plane
from Manila to Cagayan de
Oro, taken a taxi, a bus, a car,
followed by two boats to get
to a mangrove nursery on
the shores of Iligan Bay. This
long journey was organized
in order for us to speak with a
small community of villagers
living on an island north-west
of Iligan City. Here is where
the villagers — a handful
of families — had settled
after they fled their homes
in the hills during the Mindanao War
between 2008 and 2009. They were
those coined as “IDPs”, or internally
displaced persons, using NGO jargon.
Refugees within their own countries, in
other words.
Thinking back to then, it feels like
the world is irretrievably broken. There
is poverty and hunger, inequality and
iniquity. But on the other side of that,
surely there were also people who were
working to make things right. After all,
the world hasn’t fallen apart yet, has it?
For every little bit of brokenness we’ve
been responsible for, there must be
people who know how to do their part
in fixing it.
The mangroves
provide villagers
with a livelihood
Life in the Carood
Watershed in
Candijay, Bohol,
where VSO runs
a project with the
Carood Watershed
Management Council
