Why and how do people, who do not know about human hardship and suffering, are indifferent to helping the poor and brand 12-year-old children as criminals when they are just children, get elected to high offices? The reason is likely to be that they never suffered deprivation, hunger, and abandonment. They led privileged lives of entitlement and are mostly the children of rich political dynasties that seem to reign forever.  
 

He is only 13 years old and we can call him Jaybe. He has no formal education, cannot read or write and is one of hundreds of thousands of lost children of the Philippine slums. His father left the family for another woman and abandoned him with his two brothers and a three-year-old sister, Jinna. 
 

A waxing moon floated in the night sky, giving light to a small group of people huddled outside a hut in a hamlet somewhere in the hinterlands of Luzon Island in the Philippines.
There was excited talk between sips of coffee. A baby was about to be born and the comadrona, or midwife, had just arrived.
 
The sleepy hamlet of Pangotlaon is one of several small settlements that make up the village of Magsaysay in the town of Nakar in Quezon province.
 

Many people believe in some kind of “god,” which they worship in their own way, which they make the priority of their actions, pursuing their “god.” It can be money, power, wealth, property, prestige, drugs, alcohol, pleasure, possession, domination, violence, abuse, control. These are their “gods.”
 

Human trafficking is the most widespread crime against persons and is the third biggest earning business in the world after drug trafficking and arms smuggling. The earnings are estimated to be US$32 billion ($251 billion) a year, according to a United Nations (UN) report.
 

Edita T. Burgos


Even in the most excruciating and treacherous situations, people do selflessly give of themselves. Isn’t this the most concrete proof that God is within us?
 
We will never be short of living heroes from whom we can draw inspiration especially from this kind of vocation to which we have dedicated our lives, fighting for a world without enforced disappearances.
 

Luke Hunt
 
Five great refugee floods have blighted Southeast Asia over the last half-century—sparked by conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, East Timor (also known as Timor Leste) and Myanmar—in tragedies with far-reaching consequences that should have been averted.