March 3, 2008

Filipino-Canadian Mennonite uses coffee to help build peace

A Filipino-Canadian Mennonite missionary who left a life of comfort in Vancouver, Canada is helping to build peace in his native country, which he left more than 20 years ago, and one of his weapons is coffee.

“My family and I were enjoying relative peace in Canada, but it's nice to be home again to enjoy the task of helping build shalom or salam [peace] in our country, especially in Mindanao,” said the Rev. Daniel Pantoja, who heads the Peacebuilders’ Community, a Mennonite team in the Philippines.

After their three children finished university and became independent, Pantoja and his wife, Joji, returned to the Philippines in 2001 to “learn what we can do to help build peace in this country of our roots”, the peace builder told Ecumenical News International.

Part of the Peacebuilders’ Community’s mission is to convince parties in armed conflict to “allow us to listen to their aspirations and perspectives”, he said. Pantoja admitted this was not easy.

But he and his wife have now made peace-building their mission and since 2005 they have settled in Davao City in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao where they established the Peacebuilders’ Community.

The island is known as the scene of clashes between the armed forces of the Philippines and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a separatist rebel group.

Pantoja’s organisation has a centre for peace and reconciliation, field workers, inter-faith conversations (between Christians, Muslims and Lumads, or Mindanao's indigenous peoples), research and library services, coordination of peace-learning tours and cross-cultural orientation for international volunteers.

The centre also has a café called Coffee for Peace, which helps generate local, sustainable income for the organisation's peace and reconciliation field workers.

“The café is important because every time representatives of both the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Philippine military have coffee in our centre, they don't have any skirmishes during the rest of the day,” Pantoja told visitors from other parts of the Philippines in La Trinidad, the provincial capital of Benguet Province, some 300 kilometres north of Manila.

Pantoja and a team from his organisation were in La Trinidad on February 21 and 22 to coach coffee farmers about how to take control of their product through fair trade principles such as applying value to labour and cost invested on their product, and equal pay for the same work by men and women.

Sipping brewed coffee, representatives of the Philippine government, its military and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front have since held peace negotiations at the centre's café, Pantoja said. “At first, we would serve at our café three-in-one instant coffee,” he recalled. “But it dawned on us … why don't we serve our own coffee?”

The demand for quality brewed coffee in the centre's café led Pantoja and his field workers not only to use the Arabica coffee beans of Mindanao's indigenous B'laan people, but also to help them understand the principles of fair trade.

Assisting them attain a better deal from their Arabica coffee, said Pantoja, is the Peacebuilders Community's way of helping empower the B'laan, many of whom had often been displaced following skirmishes between government soldiers and rebels.

As Pantoja moves forward with his peace encounters and seminars among the peoples of Mindanao, he says they are based on Christian principles such as love, forgiveness, reconciliation and accountability. At the same time he and his staff are helping find fair trade markets in Canada for local farmers' coffee products.