Not our last mission
Then we started thinking: This is not a time for peace advocates to rest, maybe there will never be a time to do so. This is the time to be with people and for the people.

It is like a credo: “To be in the right place at the right time.” And thinking about the plight of the people we met, some phrases of the English writer Rudyard Kipling come to mind:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too.

If you can dream – and not make dreams you master
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim
If you can meet Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you,
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can fill the unforgiving minute,
While sixty seconds worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son.

What we went through is not the last Bantay Ceasefire mission and neither would it be our last. Posted by (Bulatlat.com)

This personal essay from two German interns shows the sorry plight of evacuees in Mindanao who are victims of military operations. The authors are from the German organization ASA, the European network for development education which organizes work and study visits for young people from Germany and other European countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Southeast Europe. They are currently in Mindanao as interns of the Davao-based Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID). Evgenia Lipski is studying Political Sciences and Law with focus on conflict and peace studies at the University of Bremen in Germany. Tobias Schuldt is studying Cultural Anthropology, Science of Religion and Peace and Conflict Studies in Marburg, Germany.

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