Peace Paths and Education
by Pakigdait Inc.
A school is not merely a building that houses children and teaches them various subjects; it is also a place where the community nurtures them. However, what happens when the path to the school itself proves perilous for the children?
This question lingered in the mind of Baital Hussein, the guardian of a young learner in Barangay Cabasaran in the municipality of Butig in Lanao del Sur. Baital used to worry every time she walked her niece, 8-year-old Jamila Mampao, to school. The school was far and the road going there was risky. Young Jamila had to cross a river that swelled whenever it rained. Baital remembered an instance when Jamila and the other learners were stranded on one side of the river because of flash floods.
‘It was frightening. We didn’t know when the swelling would subside,’ Baital told the workers of Pakigdait, Inc., during a visit to the community. Pakigdait is a home-grown interfaith organisation in Lanao del Norte that, for decades, has been working with government and non-government stakeholders to promote peace and reconciliation in the province and in neighbouring Lanao del Sur. ‘This happens often and is one of the reasons why parents refuse to send their children to school when the weather is bad. Many times, the children themselves refuse to go to school during rainy days,’ she added, while noting that armed conflict is also an issue in many barangays in Butig.
In Barangay Buta Sumalindaw in Sultan Dumalondong municipality, parents were also wary about the safety of their children whenever they walked to school. The barangay had no learning site and the children had to get their education outside the village. Many times, the children were forced to stay home because of the risk of violence from clan feuds and fighting between government soldiers and non-state armed groups. As a result, many of the children in the village eventually stopped schooling. ‘How can we allow our children to leave home and walk to school in these conditions?’, one parent lamented.
In 2019, a team from Education Pathways to Peace in Mindanao (Pathways), a 9-year Australia-supported peace and education program in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, held a learning forum in Cagayan de Oro City with several peace-oriented non-government organisations and civil society groups working for and in the Bangsamoro region. Pakigdait was represented by its Director, Abelardo ‘Abel’ Moya. Abel approached Pathways and offered an interesting peace and education concept to address the situation in Cabasaran, Buta Sumalindaw, and many other communities in Lanao del Sur facing the same issues. That encounter was followed by a Pathways-Pakigdait meeting in Iligan in the same year, where Fr. Teresito ‘Chito’ Suganob, then-chair of Pakigdait and former Prelate of Marawi, shared his insights on the cause of, and potential solutions to, the peace problem in the region, particularly in Lanao del Sur. ‘The problem is peace and the solution is peace,’ he told Pathways that evening. Fr. Chito knew all too well how easily conflict can threaten fragile peace after the dramatic events of his capture and subsequent rescue during the early days of the Battle of Marawi in 2017, which attracted national attention
The meeting in Iligan resulted in Pakigdait conceptualising a project proposal that sought to implement contextualised and innovative ideas in delivering education in 6 disaster-prone and conflict-affected pilot areas in the municipalities of Butig, Pagayawan, and Sultan Dumalondong in Lanao del Sur. ‘Usually, the education of the youth is among the first casualties whenever there are conflicts. We believe that educated youth will help lead the way to peace in the future. It is imperative to invest in their education now,’ Abel related to Pathways during the initial proposal development. The project encountered multiple delays, however, over changes in the pilot sites. ‘We understand. People working for peace must know how to wait,’ Abel assured Pathways. In November 2020, a teary-eyed Abel rejoiced at the good news that the proposal had finally been approved. This was a bittersweet moment for him, though, because Fr. Chito didn’t live long enough to see it come to fruition. The priest died of cardiac arrest on the morning of 22 July 2020 in his home in Norala, South Cotabato.
Baital likewise rejoiced when she found out that a learning centre would be established in Cabasaran through the Pathways-supported project of Pakigdait. The thought of her niece attending classes right in the heart of her community relieved her of her worries. She said Jamila has changed since she started attending classes at the learning centre. ‘She has gotten better at reading and is a lot more cheerful. She wants to become a teacher in the future,’ Baital shared.
In Buta Sumalindaw, the residents also celebrated upon knowing that they would finally have a learning site they could call their own. Their learning centre has 2 classrooms, which comfortably accommodated the 118 learners who attended morning and afternoon classes in the 2021–2022 academic year. Lailani Hassan, one of the residents, was a volunteer teacher at an elementary school in neighbouring Barangay Malalis when she heard the news of the project’s approval. She decided to return to her village and offered to be a learning facilitator in the first-ever learning site in her barangay. ‘My passion is teaching. I decided to teach here at the learning centre because growing up, I saw first-hand how challenging it was for the parents to educate their children,’ she told Pathways during a visit in November 2022. That same day, the community presented to Pathways a mural on peace and education conceptualised by the residents and painted by Fine Arts university students. The mural depicts the dream of the parents for Buta Sumalindaw to be a community rising from the effects of conflict, educating their children, and creating opportunities for the youth to realise their full potential.