MAGUINDANAO, Philippines (AlertNet) Â? Dressed in a pink top and a colourful sarong, Noraisa Kamid looks like any regular 29-year-old.
But she doesn't sound like one.
Kamid's stories are dominated by how an explosion almost killed her and her family nearly a year ago.
"It's hard to remove memories of the fighting," Kamid said.
"My family was at home when a bomb was dropped near our house and destroyed parts of it. Another family refused to move and their daughter died."
There are hundreds of thousands of people like Kamid living with memories of the fighting across Mindanao where a five-decade long separatist movement killed about 160,000 people and displaced up to two million people.
The last major fighting between the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and government forces took place in 2008 after a decade-long peace process collapsed and displaced 600,000 people according to a U.N.-backed report. Maguindanao was one of the worst-affected provinces.
Weapons experts said it was probably an artillery shell rather than a bomb that hit her house but for Kamid the technicalities are not important. She knows that an explosion almost took her familyÂ?s life.
And it is also a major reason she prefers to stay in the evacuation centre in Talayan municipality rather than return home.
"We are worried the soldiers will return and we will be caught in the middle (between the army and the rebels) again," she said.
Aid agencies working in Mindanao, the southernmost of Philippines' three regions, say it is as important for the internally displaced people (IDPs) like Kamid to be healthy mentally as well as physically.
The 21 million people living in Mindanao have over the past decade witnessed war, a stop-start peace process and a serious deterioration of law and order in certain parts of the island.
Drive-by shootings and kidnappings blight the region while army offensives, bomb attacks on public infrastructure and clan-based violence usually put villagers in the middle of armed conflict.
MENTAL HEALTH NEEDS
Bloodshed is not limited to army and Muslim rebels either. Add communist insurgents, private armies, bandits and breakaway rebel groups and the result is a highly mobile population living under chronically stressful conditions, aid agencies say.
Most are struggling with displacement, ongoing clan wars and the possibility of more violence during the upcoming election in an already poor region.
Medical charity Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has six mobile clinics operating five days a week offering mental health advice among general health services.
"Our mental health programme has really grown, but itÂ?s very much an unseen issue here," said Liz Harding, MSF's field coordinator.
The clinics see around 90 new cases of mental health consultations a month, mostly linked to general anxiety disorders, but MSF said it is still a challenge to get more people to open up about their concerns.
MSF psychiatrists help the IDPs to cope with whatÂ?s happened, starting with talking about their experiences. But conflict-weary IDPs tend to gloss over the details.
"(The people) are used to it but there's also very much a culture not to lose face," Harding said.
"And theyÂ?re also very happy people and that's why itÂ?s hard to see the mental health needs just by initial appearances."
PROTECTING CHILDREN
This includes children. Aid agencies are trying to inject some normalcy into their lives.
In a small but airy thatch-roofed room at the start of a coconut grove in Datu Odin Sinsuat municipality, a hundred or so three to five-year-olds were singing, dancing and playing Â? behaving like three to five-year-olds.
They have all been displaced from their homes for over a year.
This is one of 75 child-friendly spaces built by the U.N.'s children agency UNICEF across war-affected areas of Mindanao. Here, volunteer teachers, IDPs themselves, teach them song and dance numbers for an hour almost every day.
The idea is to "provide children with a protective environment" where regular routine, education and play activities have disappeared.
"Children are easily influenced by the stress experienced by their parents and social surroundings," McCauley-Lamin , chief of child protection services in UNICEF Philippines.
"Loss of, or separation from parents, siblings and care-givers for long periods of time can have a serious impact on children's emotional development and ability to communicate and learn."
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