AAI Program Snapshots

Garden of Peace: A Healing Center for Children Victims of War

Following the success of the project Fruit of Hope, Asia America Initiative Director Albert Santoli and Program Coordinator Rohaniza visited the war zone of Sulu of Muslim Mindanao to continue the integration of education and livelihood as a means of conflict resolution. AAI is partnering with the local government to coordinate projects that are planned with major international corporations and local cooperatives. The facilitating institution is the Fisheries College at Mindanao State University.

AAI began the creation of "A Healing Center for Children Victims of War. The center focuses on 200 Muslim children between the ages of 3 and 8 years old who were born and live in the area of conflict and terror. The emphasis is on people-to-people peace building. The objectives are to raise and deepen awareness of the effects of conflict on children; to call for more interventions in response to serious issues due to the exposure of armed conflict; to prevent children in areas of armed conflict to be recruitment targets of terrorist groups; and, to serve as a peace sanctuary that is needed in the children’s psychological growth and personality development, as well as a generational peace building process.

AAI seeks to create and sustain the center on private contributions from ordinary people as a statement of human solidarity among people of many cultures. The center is being created in partnership with local educators, religious leaders and the governor's office which is donating the land but does not have the funds to build and operate the center.

Sorry state of education in Lanao del Sur, Philippines

Thanks for hat tip to Rohaniza 'honey', AAI's Philippines branch Officer-In-Charge and Program Coordinator, for this video and information. It details the sorry state of education in Lanao del Sur, Philippines. This is why we need very specific, highly selective intervention and effective monitoring of such interventions to tackle these issues at the grassroot level.

Every year, the Department of Education holds the National Elementary Achievement Test for all schools and every year, schools in Mindanao end up in the bottom ten. This year, Ariman Guro Elementary School in Lanao del Sur got an average score of 21.7%, the lowest grade among all elementary schools in the Philippines.

I-Witness' Sandra Aguinaldo heads to Lanao del Sur to find out why.

She discovers Ariman Guro only has six teachers for all grade levels, teachers with no subject specializations. The school sorely lacks chairs and tables and the only textbooks sent to them by government is for the Makabayan subject, forcing the teachers to buy textbooks using money from their own pockets.

The students at Ariman Guro often miss class. Their primary reason: the prevalence of "rido" or clan wars in the area.

Many of the students here belong to warring families. 11-year old Fahad Cosain recently lost his uncle to Rido. For his own safety, he stays at home now instead of going to school. His young cousins now carry guns to protect themselves from attack.

The school's candidate for valedictorian, Rahimah Nasroden, was also affected by her family's clan war. Rahimah was not allowed to go to school during the height of the conflict, for fear of abduction and possibly even assassination. Rahimah is back to school now and determined to finish her education, believing this is her only way out of poverty.

This gripping documentary on the lives of the students and teachers of Ariman Guro airs this Monday late night on I-Witness. Entitled "Iskulelat?", the documentary was hosted and written by Sandra Aguinaldo, recently awarded as Investigative Journalist of the Year at the Rotary Journalism Awards.