Wrapping up this trip now to the Philippines with my last full day in Davao. Off tomorrow evening for Manila and then a brutally early flight out on Wednesday. This week was all about peacebuilding, which is the term aid agencies use for wide variety of projects, all aimed at dialogue, conflict resolution, and human rights work. I have to be honest and say a lot of it works better in theory than in practice. I’m too much a pessimist to believe that as more people inhabit the world, and resources become more and more scarce, that conflict won’t become more common. It’s a scary thought, especially as you see forests disappearing, deserts spreading, and land and water becoming more and more scarce everywhere. I see the impacts of those shortages just about everywhere I go, particularly in Africa and Asia, and I fear that the more environmentally off kilter the earth becomes, the more acute those shortages of resources will become, and the more conflict will subsequently arise.
But the premise of what I saw this week here in Mindanao was dialogue. The central and western regions of this island have been racked by decades of violence between indigenous groups and settlers of different religions. There is widespread mistrust here among all of the players, and that has lead to eruptions of violence in 2003 and again in 2008 that saw as many as a million people displaced. What the work CRS is doing here is designed to do is bring people of different backgrounds together – Christian and Muslim. It sounds easy, but when you look at most communities around the world, including in the US, there are relatively few places where that occurs. When we don’t understand one another, stereotypes and mistrust are the natural byproduct, and I think we’ve seen much of that in the US in the last 10 years. At least if people are talking, there is some hope.
June 20th, 2010 | by David in Travel
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All Material © 2008 David Snyder
