Over 400 circumcised in Cotabato outreach mission

COTABATO CITY — Health workers have circumcised 436 children from marginalized Moro families and treated more than a thousand others afflicted with common ailments in a series of relief missions in Cotabato in three days.

Local executives were quoted in radio reports on Wednesday as saying that the beneficiaries of the joint outreach activities, launched on Sunday, by private organizations, peace advocacy groups and the office in the 80-seat Bangsamoro parliament of regional lawmaker Kadil Monera Sinolinding Jr. are from farming enclaves in secluded areas in two newly-created towns under the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao but are inside Cotabato province in Region 12.

Created just last April via separate bills by the regional parliament, the two towns, Kaabacan and Kapalawan, covers predominantly Moro barangays grouped together as BARMM’s Special Geographic Area, whose residents voted in favor of the inclusion of their barangays in the proposed core territory of the Bangsamoro region during a plebiscite in 2019.

Barangay officials told reporters on Wednesday that they are grateful for the volunteers from the Deseret Hospital in nearby Barangay Kayaga, for the physician-ophthalmologist Sinolinding, who is also concurrent BARMM health minister, and the region’s chief minister, Ahod Balawag Ebrahim for the medical and dental missions that benefited their constituents.

Volunteers from the Deseret Hospital and the outreach team in Sinolinding’s office in the regional parliament had extended medical and dental services to 3,340 individuals, among them children and elderly Moro villagers, 436 of them treated of their cataract and pterygium via surgical procedures, in relief missions that started after his appointment as member of the BARMM parliament in 2022 by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Sinolinding told reporters on Wednesday that they are soon expanding their relief missions to other Bangsamoro barangays in the six other newly-created BARMM municipalities, Pahamudin, Kadayangan, Nabalawag, Malidegao, Tugunan and Ligawasan, also inside the territory of Cotabato province.