Written on January 5, 2015
Arrived in Davao and as Anoop has noted, the first song we heard in this city was “Material Girl” by Madonna. Zarina and Anoop and I shared a taxi to the hotel. The driver asked for 500 pesos, we gave him 150, only about three dollars and thrity cents USD, which was still probably more than we needed to pay. We entered the cab and the radio was playing “We are living in a material world…” as we drove through the narrow streets of the city while scrawny dogs hurried out of the street before us. While Davao is probably the most developed city in Mindanao, the poverty here is easily seen.
I sat in the front. The driver had a crucifix hanging prominently from his rearview mirror. As Anoop mentioned, he asked us if we are missionaries and I laughed a little to myself as I answered “No,” because of the incongruous nature of that question and my own background, and Madonna’s voice echoing in the cab, but of course that is a serious issue on Mindanao and not a laughing matter. Given the history here, the role of missionaries, conversions, and invasions into the native culture and lands, to come to Mindanao is a political act in a deep and complicated context where the question of who you are, and how you identify yourself is a serious one.
A solider stopped the taxi as we left the airport and asked for our last names. I gave mine which he seemed to consider momentarily. The taxi driver then said that we were Americans and then the solider impatiently waved us through. I’m not at all sure what that was about but I remembered crossing in to Israel and being asked by a young female soldier behind a computer screen what my Father’s name was. I told her and she looked at her screen and nodded. She asked then what his Father’s name was, and again, I told her and she looked at her screen and nodded. She then asked for my Great Grandfather’s name, and I answered, “I don’t know. Do you?!” She looked back at her screen and smiled. Who knows what was really on it, maybe a vast intelligence database of family trees, maybe youtube videos of cats. But I wondered here in Davao as we left the airport if it was at all related, if they wanted to identify our religion or ethnicity before allowing us to pass.
So we come to Mindanao not as missionaries but Americans (although Zarina, of course is actually from Kazakhstan and Anoop was born in India). I am now acutely aware of how much I don’t know about the period of American colonialism in the Philippines, which is an embarrassing thing to realize having arrived here. I know of course that the US period had a significant impact on the evolution of the conflict in Mindanao, in particular through population movements and discriminatory land laws but so much is still unclear. I’m not entirely clear on the current level of military involvement and the work on economic development and I find myself wondering which US corporations are here and how American and other foreign business interests might have and might still be unintentionally (or intentionally) exacerbating both the poverty and the violence here. “Material World” after all.
My sense of the Mindanao conflict and the identity issues at play here before I left was very much shaped by the analyses of external actors, but it was the descriptions of those for whom Mindanao is home, who are working inside conflict communities as a community member, such as Father Bert Layson, and the collaborations of local villages with the military and armed resistance groups to create zones of peace, that most inspired me to come. I am excited for the beginning of our journey here and really looking forward to meeting the staff of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) who are so generously hosting us here. It will be my first opportunity to meet those who have accepted the challenge of working to build peace alongside the people of Mindanao in the villages and hear from them first hand what they believe the real issues and challenges are and what brought them to do this work.