Welcome to Paghahabi

    Paghahabi is the Filipino term for weaving materials such as textile, mats, baskets. It also means the weaving or telling of stories.

    In essence, paghahabi reflects the core competency of the AIJC, ie communication. This competency transmits truth, creates understanding, builds community. It brings together the diversity of warp and woof and interlaces them into a single colorful fabric of concord and trust.

    Our e-newsletter Paghahabi tells AIJC's stories. It reflects our efforts to promote understanding amidst diversity through our various communication programs and projects and to build a network of AIJC partners and stakeholders whose stories are intertwined with ours.

    The AIJC is committed to weave a community committed to the common good and the best interest especially of marginalized sectors that need the comfort of a warm woven fabric.

  • Previous Issues
  • May-June 2011
  • April 2011
  • January-March 2011
  • Nov-Dec. 2010
  • Sept.-Oct. 2010
  • August 2010

Mindanao youth learn techie skills for peace

"The world is filled with different cultures, religion, attitudes and beliefs. Each person differs from another in every form. But I believe that the diversity, the uniqueness, the difference - it's what makes the world so beautiful."

Writing eloquently in English in a blog post entitled "Would You Mind Lending a Hand for a Brighter World?", Nisreen Aini Teo is a 16-year-old Tausug (a Muslim ethnolinguistic group in the Philippines), enrolled in a Catholic school, and was a participant in the "Seminar-Workshop on the Use of ICT in Conflict and Post-Conflict Areas" held on August 3-6, 2011 in Zamboanga City.

Zamboanga is a city in southwestern Mindanao, the southern island of the Philippines which is home to most of the country's Muslim communities.

With funding from UNESCO Office Jakarta and UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, the workshop was conducted by the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication (AIJC) in partnership with the National Computer Center-Field Operations Office (NCC-FOO), Zamboanga City.

The twenty participants of the workshop were a culturally diverse mix of high school students from public and private high schools and out-of-school youth who gathered at the NCC-FOO computer laboratory to learn about using the Internet and social media for peace building.

Muslim groups represented in the workshop included the Tausug, Sama and Yakan, and two participants were Subanen, the indigenous people of the Zamboanga peninsula.

In his blog post, "Peace: The Best Song," 15-year-old Giro Paul Gangoso, a lead guitarist in a school band and senior student of the Regional Scence High School, wrote, "Peace is a collective effort of every human being in the world, like playing guitar, it's a collective effort of the different notes and chords that complete a song."

During the four-day workshop, the participants wrote essays on peace and peace building. They also learned how to create a blog site and a personal Google site and how to produce a video material. Their essays on peace were later posted in the individual sites they created, while their video productions were shown during the last day of the workshop.

Works in progress are the group Facebook account and the batch website that were created by the participants. Administrators of these sites are from the participants themselves. (Ann Lourdes C. Lopez, Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication). | Home