It will be at the Family Country Hotel and Convention Center at the Tuna Capital of the Philippines, General Santos City on October 25-26, 2008.

I was asked to give a brief sharing on Voices from Mindanao Heartroots: Notes on Life & Living in the Communities.

I can't wait to return to Gensan for MBS2! I'm looking forward to meeting old and new friends and to learn from them during this gathering! I'm sure this is a much-awaited sequel to Davao's MBS1 last year. 

I would like to echo gratitude from our organizers to the following for helping put this summit together:

CO-PRESENTERS:
NOKIA (Philippines), Inc.
Mayor Pedro B. Acharon, Jr.
Congresswoman Darlene Antonino-Custodio
ABS-CBN Regional Network Group
Mindanao Bloggers
Bariles Republic

GOLD SPONSORS:
ACLC-Skeptron Ventures, Inc.

SILVER SPONSORS:
NoKiAHOST.COM
Family Country Hotel & Convention Center
East Asia Royale Hotel

BRONZE SPONSORS:
Digital Filipino
Pacific Seas Seafood Market
Shalom-Crest Wizard Academy
Generals Logimark Exponent
Prints and You
Sta. Cruz Seafood, Inc.
Dellosa Design Builders, Inc

First and foremost, thanks to those who are behind the Top 100 Mindanao Blogs of 2007.

Nakatunga nalang ang 2008, ayha pa ko naka comment ani. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s “Better late than never!”

I am glad that Istambay sa Mindanao was included in the list, despite being stagnant most of the time.

Blogging has good prospects but my new work terrain here in Bukidnon required realigning priorities.

After publishing 32 issues of our weekly local newspaper Central Mindanao Newswatch, I have mixed reactions. I am both happy and sad.

I am happy because of the things that we have started and are now starting to bear fruit.

We have tried to expand coverage with more stories on business, culture, livelihood, local governance, education, sports, justice and the voices of the marginalized.

In the past it has been mostly on crime and violence and the top stories in the province.

Now, we are also improving our “follow up” stories so our readers would get a chance to be updated of the week’s top stories.

Aside from covering more fields, we are also working on expanding the range of the points of view that we take. The easiest to manage is the chief of police, the mayor, and the board members among other “official sources.”

Now we want to give more space and effort to “unofficial” sources; which include the grassroots sectors such as farmers, small and medium entrepreneurs, teachers, among other people.

In line with this, we have launched the column “Voice of the People”, the paper’s section for contributors.

All in all, we intend to provide more local content to the local newspaper and try to make a dent in democracy (lofty, lofty!).

Honestly, we want to reinvent the local newspaper in order to survive. We are faced with a big number of concerns.
One thing that makes me sad is the biting reality of poor advertisement and subscription. Street sales are also down.

Some of our field personnel suggested we might as well show lotto numbers, more violence, gossip and filth/sex in our weekly issues. That’s what our tabloid competitors have done.

Radio is of course the number one threat.

We have to continuously search for ways to reinvent ourselves with our very limited resources.

There is only one reporter now and a few part-time sales personnel.

We have tried to strike a balance in maximizing our resources to come up with more local content and the need to come out on-time. It is discouraging at times. The other day I met our circulation man and he told me another subscriber, a courier, has subscribed to the smut newspaper from Cagayan de Oro.

It just struck me and was there pinned in my seat thinking what more efforts we could pull off to improve more.

While other journalists discuss about their experiences as online or mobile journalists, with all the modern gadgets they had since time, I am quite stuck here trying to make both ends meet --- how to deliver good local news and other content on time.

Quite a gloomy picture, but I see some bright lights ahead.

Still, we are lucky that we still have a big room to navigate through --- more improvements but without intending to compromise truth, professionalism and relevance.

This is the paper's second attempt to put up a blog for the community newspaper based in Malaybalay City.

This try was triggered by a recent mechanical problem, which delayed the release of the week’s issue. The paper received constant queries on when to release the paper.

This inspired Newswatch staffers to put online some of the paper’s top stories.Going online, at least in the blogosphere, would be among the new ways the paper can serve the people of the province who are in Bukidnon and in many parts of the world.

This becomes part of the way the paper celebrates 20 years in service as “press freedom fighter from the Heart of Mindanao”.

Ma'am Prix (and to all who are unfamiliar with it), Kamuyot is Bukidnon's version of the tinalak. It's made of sinamay from abaca fiber, from plantations scattered in Bukidnon's rugged terrain. Of course, its woven mostly by indigenous women who sell it to buyers from the lowlands.

It's a business beginning to die --unless the government and the lumad communities could save it together against fiber plant diseases haunting even planters in our beloved Davao City.

I'm in for some updates from the Bukidnon plateau.

We have started to provide local and community-sourced content for our local newspaper the Central Mindanao Newswatch. We begin to invite contributors to send in news stories, opinion pieces, photos, and even useful information. Thank God, good responses come despite our financial constraints.

Our goal is to beef up coverage of local stories. But the resources come in trickles. Sometimes, I get discouraged, frustrated and exhausted.

I'm working on the internal resources of the office, trying to help management improve its use of limited resources and also organizing in-house trainings and consultations to respond to human resource needs.

I missed our work in MindaNews, but I'm also directing our own efforts here to be able to afford our subscription to the Davao-based news agency, which a group of journalists of which I'm a part of, have operated with shoestring resources but proudly with wide-ranging impacts. :-)

It's not an easy thing to do all these efforts.

I've got branded to be "someone who did not use his coconut". "Why waste so much time on a media work when it won't make you rich?" That has been "thought of the day" for a week. One of our interns at MindaNews told me, her father considered media work as worthy of no "(professional) identity." In short, it is worthless in a society of lawyers, doctors, engineers and other professionals.

I didn't have to argue that. I don't want to recycle what figured in conversations between me and my father over the years. We have already agreed to disagree on that.

Oh yes, what so much I can do, still won't be enough. What I thought is enough is never enough.

But I would still continue to stick to my dream to run a newspaper that covers the community's issues. I won't be lured to working in an 8 to 5 job that guarantees my tenure, assures me excessive bonuses on Christmas and promises my job would be as easy as preparing an instant coffee mix.

I still believed in the role of the media in an ever-changing world, especially in the scale of a province like Bukidnon.

Life here is difficult. I can take other paths to make it easy.

But without compromising my own and my families' right to life, I'll stick to what I think is my own trail in the jungle of uniformities and conventions.

We should be equal but we don't have to be alike.

Anyway, thanks for dropping by!

Merry Christmas.

I'm back to my home province Bukidnon and on my day one as editor of Malaybalay's Central Mindanao Newswatch.

Actually I'm just a consultant to the 19-year old weekly paper. From 2000 to 2004, I worked as a full time staff here, from being a marketing officer, reporter and editor before resigning in April 2004 and joining the Davao staff of MindaNews in June 2004.

After a meeting with the manager in the morning, I was scheduled to meet the communication development interns from Bukidnon State University.

Tomorrow, I hope I really make it to Bendum, Busdi, Malaybalay City for an assignment with MindaNews. I will stay connected to our cooperative of journalists based in Davao City.

These and a correspondent work with the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN) should keep me busy as a freelance reporter in this province.

For a while I would miss Davao City, but this should be a welcome respite --back to base.

I hope I could still give substantial updates on Mindanao from Bukidnon. Best wishes to all.

This time, however, it has become official. The government started to include Bukidnon’s mining potentials in its marketing presentations to foreign investors. Read the rest of the post on Bukidnon Reporter blog.

Speaking to at least 60 bloggers at the opening ceremonies of the 1st Mindanao Bloggers’ Summit, organizers and resource speakers took turns in urging bloggers to publish entries that contribute to understanding

Oliver Robillo, head of the organizers said blogging, if done collectively, could help influence society.

"As bloggers, we are in possession of a potentially influential medium, and it is that ability that we can harness in order to impress upon the world that Mindanao is in fact a beautiful place. We know that ourselves. We know that we are of diverse, and yet somehow harmonious, cultures. We have in our midst different but fascinating traditions," he said.

Robillo said bloggers could tell the rest of the world the real situation in Mindanao. Read the full report on MindaNews.com. Also this one by Carolyn O. Arguillas.

It's still a world of instant coffee.

A friend from academia dropped a message in my inbox to ask for an online chat via Yahoo Messenger or Google Chat. I was surprised since the last contact we made was two years ago in a UP e-group.

He said as a journalist I could give him a quick explanation about Mindanao, its indigenous peoples, the issue of ancestral domain, the Mindanao conflict, why some IPs oppose mining, and also the peace process. He was trying to prepare a primer on Mindanao.

I knew it was an overview paper. It was an ambitious overview paper. It is doable I'm sure. I find preparing a primer on Mindanao, however, out of synch and possibly a waste of time. Such primer could be for anyone rushing. But I think one shouldn't rush any attempt to understand Mindanao.

A primer or an overview should be short. But preparing one on Mindanao should take in more than a "bird's eye view." It should be as good as the ant's view, the side view or the under the table view. Maybe, that's not a primer anymore? I am usually an eager informant. But I refused this time. To be the key informant of such an expansive row of topics required apt mind, heart and experience aside from hours of freedom.

For now I'm not a freeman. I'm tied to a lot of work, including backlogs. Besides, I know I could refer him to the experts of each specific topic, which I did,rather than monopolize and assume with my generalist's take. He obliged, fortunately.

To talk about those things for his paper is quite demanding. For a graduate paper I found the topic too broad, too.

But that was not my point.

First, I don't claim to understand Mindanao just because I'm a journalist.

Second, there is no quick way to study Mindanao.

We need a complete mix of sources to be able to do that. Here are a few means:

• Being here is a requisite. One cannot claim to study in absencia. They can study from afar, but they should have enough time to use books and other materials to grasp A PORTION of the knowledge and understanding.
• The books,newspapers, and the mass media are a big help, but not enough
• Mindanao as a span of coverage is also broad. What is Mindanao and who are in Mindanao? If you talk about Mindanao, who are your cast of characters? The people in cities, in power, in conflict? That in itself is a complex field of study as it touches on sensitive issues of forced and organized migration, dislocation, and location.
• To understand one has to get through a shift of paradigm --- bearing in mind the subject of the study's distinct world view or understanding of things. Like one basic thing is to understand that many people, especially indigenous people, do not traditionally measure distance by kilometers and height by meters, or wealth by cash. In short, they have their own worldviews. One should understand that worldview first before even attempting to understand them. If that's too complicated, well, I guess that's it.
• The best way to get a world view into your sleeve is to be with the people - to talk to them, eat with them, dialogue with them. This I think is useful on why lumad groups oppose mining and logging companies in their ancestral domains. Their lifeworlds could be altered.
• As to the culture and the struggle for self determination among the Moro and the Lumads, I find listening to them narrate their experiences as revealing, informative and enlightening. Especially for the lumads, whose stories and experiences are still off the print and have remained in their oral traditions
• As to the Mindanao conflict, the books and other materials with accounts of the roots of the conflicts are useful materials. But more interactions should brew among the peace dreamers and workers, not just the combatants.
• As to the peace process, one cannot just look at one sector ---the government or the funding agencies supporting the government for peace. The real witnesses to the making and unmaking of peace are the people on the ground. They are at the frontlines of hostilities. When clashes occur between the two major parties to the conflict, say the GRP and the MILF, the people are in the combat zones busy either evacuating or crying helplessly under firefightings.
•  There are peoples organizations who could tell the real picture of what happened and what they dream to happen instead.
• Sometimes we are tempted to just ask those "experts" and the top officials who claim to have enough preparation and experience to discuss the peace process or the Mindanao conflict. We often neglect the voice of the voiceless and the powerless. Their voices matter, too, and oftentimes the ones that truly matter. Ehem.
• As to the interplay of these different scenes in Mindanao,in one side those working to develop and make Mindanao economically grow as the other side grapples with the taxing peace processes, one needs to be a keen observer. Library work cannot be much of help as much of these are not yet in books. Some could be found in the internet. But the bulk of these needs to be squeezed from all the stakeholders who take hold of the key to understanding and peace.
• Plus, many other means from other sources who probably know better.

The complexities and inter-related-ness of the micro issues and concerns behind, below, be side and above the bigger isuse of unpeace and poverty in Mindanao cannot be simplified.

The short of it all is that there is no short cut to understanding Mindanao. There could be some careful means to be able to take into account the facets that form part of the whole. But it is a long and wide history/histories (apologies to the gender sensitives).

I am not saying it is impossible to understand Mindanao. All I'm saying is it takes time, involves a lot of sources, and uses a much wider facility of means and efforts.

By YM or Google chat, no. Certainly, it goes beyond finishing a cup of coffee.

It should be both a formal and informal current events journal focused on Bukidnon, geographically at the heart of and along the crossroads of Mindanao.

This will mark my homecoming to the province. Starting in the first week of November, I will be based, again, in Malaybalay City, for a new assignment.

Istambay sa Mindanao, which became an online journal about my Davao City stint from May 2004 to October 2007, will stay. It will remain as a simple pod to megaphone relevant news, issues and events on Mindanao and its peoples.

As planned, Barangay Mindanao, which is an all-Binisaya blog on Mindanao, should be published by a group of Cebuano-language bloggers and writers within a year's time. Heartfelt thanks for the visits.