The women are huddled in front of a bamboo pole, their bare feet caked in mud from last night's downpour, whispering among themselves, when I arrive in the evacuation center. It is nine o'clock. The sun is already high in the sky. "Aday. It was a girl." They mutter, their heads shaking, stares fixed on the ground. They become silent as soon as the truck stops in front of them." They are here," I hear a familiar voice, Ayesha’s voice, the social worker whose task is to supervise relief operations in this remote village. "Come inside," she waves at me. She is standing under an enormous blue tent, which for the past three weeks has been her home and office. "We brought several sacks of rice," I point to the truck as I walk towards her. "I'll ask somebody to bring them in," she tells me." What happened?" I ask her. Ayesha tells me the story. There was a woman who gave birth at the crack of dawn. One of the refugees. The child was premature. Stillborn. Fleeing their village three days on foot was too much for her. That could have induced the early contraction. Aday. Baba pan panem. Ayesha worries that the refugee woman's husband does not know yet. He did not return to the evacuation center last night. It must be the rain. It poured heavily throughout the evening. He went back to the village to check their house yesterday morning together with the other husbands. Harvest is only ten days away. It is here almost the husband told his wife that he wanted to have money in time for the birth of their child. The rice field was beginning to turn golden when they heard the droning of the military choppers two weeks ago. But the husband said the conflict was far from their village. "It will pass like before," he tried to placate his wife and mother-in-law. And now his family is in an evacuation center in this unfamiliar village, together with hundred other families, bringing with them only the barest essentials in their rush to make an escape when bombs started falling from the sky. His daughter is dead. He still does not know the news. "You may be hungry by now," Ayesha says as she sets the table. There is grilled mudfish. I look outside the tent. There are hundreds of people in the back yard. They are refugees who have fled their homes-like the woman grieving her dead child- taking shelter in this village since fighting started two weeks ago. Nobody knows for certain which side started the recent spate of violence. When the peace negotiation between the government and the Muslim rebels bogged down in June, it was almost certain that this was going to happen. The agreement would have paved the way for the creation of a large autonomous region that allows the Muslims greater freedom to practice their faith, and with it systems that will shape the future that they long for. But some politicians, mostly scions of settler families from the North, cried fowl. They claim that they were not consulted about the provisions of the agreement. After all, they have settled in this part of the country for decades. Their parents came here in packs, starting in the 1920s when they were offered homesteads to populate the region by the national government. They, too, have rights. Whatever the Muslims claim, this is home for them as well. The agreement violated the Constitution. That is what they argued. They went to the Supreme Court and asked that the signing of the agreement be stopped. They got what they wanted. The fighting began. "I'm not really hungry," I tell Ayesha. She offers me coffee instead. Who can eat when everybody else is hungry? When refugees started arriving two weeks earlier, she had called me." We need help. There are a hundred families here. Relief has not arrived." We met five years ago. She was then a social work intern when fighting broke out. She was assisting relief operations in my hometown. I was a documentarist eager for a subject. We became instant friends, and when I got her call, I knew she desperately needed help. Today she is assigned to this village fifteen kilometers away from the town center. You have to travel across rough, dusty limestone road to get here. When it rains, it becomes the gloppy mud you pray you never get stuck in. It is like swimming in a bowl of thick oatmeal. I started calling friends to ask for donations. Money, food, blankets, medicines, anything. Relying on aid from the social welfare department is frustrating. They refuse to give food aid to refugees in evacuation centers far-flung villages. “They say the relief goods will only go to the rebels, ' a friend of mine, a veteran journalist who has been covering the armed conflict since the 1970s. Charity organizations, the type that big businesses establish to circumvent tax laws, are the most atrocious kind. They assure you that help is coming in the next hour or so. You relay the good news to refugees who depend on your strong connection for their supper, only to find out later that help will not arrive that day because a TV network is too busy to cover the PR stint. The refugee will get disappointed. You ask yourself: Will they trust me tomorrow? And now that a child is dead, maybe people from the network will come. A truck relief goods, too. TV has a penchant for hyperbole, and a dead child, a victim of war, even, indirectly, might make it to the six-thirty newscast. The United Nations Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon said that this war had become a serious humanitarian disaster. According to a CNN report, the World Food Programme had warned of shortages in food supply in their efforts in Darfur and other places due to the looming world financial crisis. It will only take a matter of time before relief supply dries up in their efforts here in Mindanao, where the Muslim insurgency has been going on for the past forty years. When I drove to the village an hour earlier I remembered the first time I encountered the war. It was in the summer of 2000, a very long time ago. I returned to my hometown to shoot photographs. A few weeks after I arrived, the president declared war against the Muslim secessionists. The war displaced almost a million people. I took hundreds of photographs of the refugees, and now I chose not to bring a camera, but just capture these indelible images in my memory: the forlorn faces of mothers trying to hush their crying infants, livestock tied to a tree with a leash so short they might die of strangulation, a heap of belongings here and there, smokes billowing from makeshift stoves which leave me dumbstruck—what could they be cooking?—when help is yet to arrive. I arrived only thirty minutes ago. The sacks of rice that I brought are still stacked at the house's front porch. These images will stick in my mind for a long time. From time to time, it will wake me up from a comfortable sleep. These images I will never forget. Aday. It was a girl. I overhear a woman tell her teenage daughter as they pass the tent. Soon the entire village will hear the news. The child is dead. Her father does not know yet. He guards the rice field now heavy with fruit from birds and looters. Under a mango tree, he thinks of his wife and, in his mind, a child yet to be born. He remembers the worry on his wife's face when he left her only yesterday. Yesterday was a long time ago. He consoles himself with a thought. My child will grow strong and study hard and become a professional and live in the city far from all this. "From a distance, a chopper cuts the silence. Reality sets in again. "They have sent for the father," Ayesha announces. "They will bury the child after the noon prayer." I nod and drink my coffee until I choke on the granules that have settled it the bottom of the cup. THE MAN BEHIND Hailing from the traditional family of Maguindanao, Gutierrez Mangansakan is a prolific writer, educator, art scholar, and award-winning filmmaker. Spending more than 20 years in the film industry, Mangansakan, or popularly known as Tng Man ( pronounced as teng man) is considered as one of the prominent personalities of the Regional Cinema Movement in the Philippines. He produced many films that received international accolades. In 2010, Libunan was a finalist in the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival. It was nominated in the Gawad Urian (Critics Prize) for best film and was selected as the closing film of the Critics Week section of the prestigious Venice International Film Festival. This movie centers on a Muslim woman who is forced to marry a man whom she does not know to obey the long-time tradition of a Muslim family. Other films that take part in Gutierrez’ body of works include the following: ❖ Cartas de la Soledad (Letters of Solitude) (2011), a story about Rashid Ali, who studied and worked in Europe for 25 years. He returns to Maguindanao to change the lives of the Maguindanaoans. ❖ Forbidden Memory (2016)- a film that recounts the killing of 1,500 men from Malisbong and neighboring villages in Palimbang, Sultan Kudarat in September 1974. There were 3,000 women and children were rescued when the massacre took place. ❖ The Obscured Histories and Silent Longings of Daguluan's Children (2012)- the film presents the daily struggle of the people with poverty, while they continue to preserve their traditions despite the coming of the war. ❖ Daughters of the Three Tailed Banner (2016)- the film shows the dilemma of the Muslim women in the male-dominated society. As a writer, Gutierrez’ works contributed to more than two dozen of books in the Philippines and abroad. In 2008, he was a writer-in-residence in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. He served as a fellow of the 54th University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop in 2015. In 2018, he was a mentor of the Asia Pacific Screen Lab - Griffith Film School of the University of Queensland, Australia. In September 2019, the Office of the President-Film Development Council of the Philippines honored Gutierrez for his artistry, vision, and contribution to the development of the Philippine national cinema