Message on Angie Ipong’s book launching

Message on Angie Ipong’s book launching

(Message for the book launch, April 9, 2010, Toronto)

Let me congratulate The Philippine Solidarity Network-Toronto and the Family and Friends of Angie Ipong for the launching of “Garden Behind Bars”, the diary and letters of Angie Ipong, a political prisoner in Mindanao, who has been languishing in jail for the past five years after being literally abducted and tortured before being surfaced to face multiple trumped-up criminal charges.

I have known Angie from the late seventies when I met her and her husband, Boy Ipong, during my stint as a primary health care practicioner working with community-based health programs pioneered by the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines (RMP), an arm of the Association of Major Religious Superiors in the Philippines (AMRSP). Angie and Boy were lay workers of the RMP.

Even then, she and her late husband struck me as the kind of quiet, hardworking, committed grassroots leaders who were making a real difference raising awareness, mobilizing and organizing the peasant masses in Mindanao.

I lost touch with the husband and wife team except to learn that Boy had perished together with several nuns and other RMP workers in the Cassandra ship mishap. It was only a year ago that I was finally able to visit Angie in prison, a promise to her sister, who hosted me when I came over to Canada to keynote the launching of Bayan-Canada.

Angie was the picture of fortitude, resilience, optimism and good cheer as she welcomed us. We saw how she had transformed a barren piece of land inside the jail compound into a thriving vegetable garden to augment the meager food supplied by the jail authorities. There were also numerous income-generating projects that she had started such as garments, hand-made cards, etc. to which she encouraged inmates to undertake with the necessary training to boot. She also organized the inmates and became some sort of “mayora” or acknowledged leader to help mediate conflicts among the inmates, negotiate and make representation with the authorities and in general, make like more bearable, more productive and more humane inside detention.

In short, Angie applied what she had learned in her years of working as a social activist among the poorest of the poor and the most powerless of the toiling masses, to the dismal conditions in jail.

Her book tells us about her life before her travails as a political prisoner and her struggle to attain freedom and justice. It is a heartfelt tale and is a testament to how one’s faith in the cause one is fighting for – social and national liberation for our people – can carry you through the most intense trial of an unjust, prolonged incarceration.

I hope you will each buy a copy of the book and thus help to raise the funds necessary for Angie to pursue her fight in the courts and bring her plight to the attention of more people. Hopefully solidarity for her struggle may be strengthened among compatriots and supporters in Canada so that she may soon achieve her freedom.

Congratulations again and more power to your tireless efforts in generating solidarity for the just struggles of the people of the Philippines!

Dr. Carol P. Araullo
Chairperson, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan