Healing scars with music
Jim Mulroney
Her haunting melodies and soft voice sooth and her rhythmic body movements, like a gazelle poising to spring, lulls her audience as her voice fades into the sacred sound of her bamboo flute.
Dom-an Manegdeg sings and plays for healing. She lost her human-rights advocate husband, Jose Manegdeg on November 28, 2005. He was shot 22 times in the course of his work as a lay leader in the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines movement, while delivering a lecture on human rights to workers in a tobacco plantation in San Esteban, Ilocos Sur. Manegdeg believes members of the military are responsible for his untimely death, but she knows this will never be resolved.
She was left grieving, not only his death, but also those of her two brothers, whom she explains died around about the same time in what she calls "senseless violence."
The revenge of the 35-year-old flautist is not a violent one, but the message of peace and healing. She explains that she plays the flute to create a space for silence, where she can renew her strength that has been evaporated by the violence that has pervaded her life.
The 35-year-old widow says the flute is healing, but to be healed of her scars of lost loved ones, she is in need of social healing as well. She explains that the death of her husband was something social, "so my total healing lies in social healing," she reflects.
The mother of two daughters, Manegdeg is a graduate in medical technology of St Louis University. She also worked as a care-giver in Hong Kong for a few years. But today, her new-found vocation takes her to violent trouble spots and prayer vigils.
Her mission is to bring peace to the lives of the downtrodden and violently oppressed people of her native Philippines.
She explains that she plays and sings to lead people towards social healing as she is profoundly conscious that the wrong done to her is a social sin and the only road to complete healing lies in the healing of the social ailments that plague the people of her beloved land.
Fr Jim Mulroney is currently the editor of the Sunday Examiner newspaper in Hong Kong.
