TALK about Moro issues at the coffee shop or request book topics to read over hotly brewed coffee and native delicacies from the management of Café Mindanaw and the owners’ friends in the circle of peace advocacy.
Coffee chat can go anywhere about the Moro people: from facts about their centuries-old struggle for self-determination to guided review of local history on café walls of old photographs of places and people, and by the authentic taste of pastil (steamed rice stuffed with corned stew native chicken wrapped in banana leaf), tipas (native crackers), bruwa (native cupcake), tuna kinilaw (local ceviche), listening to unaltered sound of ethnic music.
These, over hotly brewed native coffee served as one’s group revisits the past and engages the present for a glimpse of the future.
The Sinarimbo family in Cotabato City has opened the Café Mindanaw (near the corner of Ramon Rabago Sr. Avenue and T.V. Juliano Avenue) with circles of professional friends in the legal profession as well as in the peace advocacy and development works attending the simple ceremony on March 18.
Journalists visiting the city are used to conveniently bring along plastic bags for a few pairs of pastil (naturally preserved on slightly fire-lodged banana leaf) and bottled water during coverage of running stories in Maguindanao.
Now, aside from having the real taste of pastil’s authentic version in the province, they would also have the forum in Café Mindanaw for more story sources to balance tales of conflict with better appreciation of the culture, history and food tradition, over relaxing aroma and distinct taste of locally brewed coffee.
Cotabato City Mayor Cynthia Guaini-Sayadi opened the new establishment— whose owners and workers are committed to promote the concept of social enterprise— honoring them with the ceremonial ribbon-cutting.
At the ceremonies, the mayor met her long lost paternal kin in Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan (National Living Treasures) Awardees Esmael Ahmad, a transcendental ethic musician playing ancient notes of the “Pal’ndag” on bamboo flute, and the two-stringed kutyapi (zither), and Bitol Sulaiman, also kutyapi player, both from Linantangan, Maguindanao. The first Gamaba awardee from Maguindanao was the late Kutyapi Master Samaon Sulaiman, Bitol’s elder brother.
Café Mindanaw is owned by young entrepreneur Hassan Alonto Sinarimbo, son of lawyer Naguib Sinarimbo and Ross Alonto of the Department of Trade and Industry in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, a descendant of that illustrious Lanao family.