Pakigdait CC | Southeast Asia and the Pacific Region
In Kauswagan, a village in the Philippine province of Lanao del Norte, Muslim worshippers leaving evening prayers on the final day of Ramadan were met by what in most places would be considered an unusual crowd: Christian villagers bearing flowers. In what is now an eight-year tradition in this village and three others, Christians greet their Muslim neighbors, woman-to-woman and man-to-man, and then share in the Eid al-Fitr feast with them. This simple but powerful gesture of solidarity was started by URI’s Pakigdait CC, which has done extensive interfaith dialogue and peacebuilding work in majority-Muslim Mindanao, a region still struggling with a decades-long Islamist insurgency.
