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PW: And this is an obvious road towards extending the work that Buena Vista is doing into an international realm. Can you tell me about other initiatives that were born out of this kind of heightened consciousness and awareness of what's happening?

MY: Yeah. Well, I think immediately following the work with these particular communities, we became aware, probably through our national networks of our Methodist church of the push to begin moving into Iraq, and how unjustifiable that was going to be because of the way that it was being manipulated politically and in terms of with information. And now we know what Colin Powell has said about the stuff that he was bringing to the Congress and so forth. And we were very involved in trying to stop that, in terms of our social justice committee that I mentioned, and we had, at that time, an intern, Allison Mark who was with us, and she was doing a lot of work with our organizing and we were very active in anti-war movement protests against going into Iraq. Once we did go into Iraq, then we were involved in getting out of Iraq, so we were involved in a lot of activities. Jose Arcellana was another key member of our committee, I think, who was championing our visible activities around that endeavor. And that went on for a while.

And I think that was kind of a prelude into Barack Obama's election in 2008, because he ran on getting out of Iraq, right. And there was a lot of peace groups that were organizing to get him elected, and that was kind of a threshold moment when he did get elected. But I think what most people will see, that the peace movement kind of disintegrated after he got elected. There was no sustained movement forward into things, and it is kind of what it is now.

PW: I know that this campaign to get out of Iraq was not the only initiative that was happening at the same time, or that started to evolve Buena Vista. Can you share some stories about work in the Philippines?

MY: Yeah. 2006, I was involved in helping to lead a delegation to the Philippines with our Bishop Shamana and several of our leaders in our conference, in the Cal-Nevada Conference of the Methodist Church, and we came back and started a task force on human rights in the Philippines called the Philippine Human Rights Task Force, or Philippine Solidarity Task Force, excuse me. And we had congregation members that also went on to trips there successive years, including Kira Azzam and Nikki Salde Azzam, they became kind of leaders in that task force. Jeanelle Ablola, who was one of my interns at the time, also went on trips, and she actually is now the co-chair of that taskforce and became very involved as well. So we were doing a lot of work around that, which was really connected to the whole War on Terror because when the War on Terror kind of got launched after 9/11, the Philippines became approached as a partner for the U.S. in the War on Terror. But what happened was they were using that guise to target human rights activists in the Philippines, including lawyers, people working with fisher folks, labor, student organizations as well as clergy activists. And there was actually a United Methodist clergy who was killed in part of the attacks on the activists in the guise of the War on Terrorism.

And so we called these extrajudicial killings, which were spiking up after 9/11. And what we were doing was doing trips there to the region every year to get exposure and have meetings with people who were being impacted by what was going on, bringing that back for education here in our country, and then also advocating for the issue to be (addressed) much more in this country as well. And what evolved around that again was that task force we had for our conference, and leadership that also emerged from our conference. And I think Kira, Nikki, and Jeanelle are key leaders now, and that Jeanelle moved on to become the pastor of the Pine United Methodist Church after her stint with us as an intern, and also partly as a staff for some time. And they are now kind of like leaders in that movement.

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