“When the Spanish missionaries came, they teach us to pray looking up the sky while they grab our lands. When the American missionaries came, they teach us to pray closing our eyes while they abused our land. Now, Filipinos learned how to pray with one eye opened!” (… a Peasant reflection) My Roots…my Story… My “Popoy” (grandparent) told me the wonderful stories about how huge the American bread was, how abundant were the powdered milk, the canned margarine, the chocolates during the American occupation. My paternal grandparents were a happy host of American missionaries in the early 1900s, later most of their family were converted into the Protestant faith. In my youth I used to go fishing with my “barkada” (friends) and to spend overnite fishing in an open sea between Leyte and Bohol. I can feel the hardship of a fisherman’s life waking up early morning and staying late in the night over the dark and vast sea for a handful of fish catch un-able to feed his family. I live with a farmer’s family in the hinterland of Cebu and share with the family’s table of dried fish fried with water because they cannot afford for cooking oil. With my host family I experience a farmer’s family life, waking up early morning to tend their farm but the whole family’s labor could not feed them until the next harvest. Sometime in the late 1970s we were made to live with a family in Dagat-dagatan, Tondo as part of our urban exposure. I experience sleeping under the dining table among six children and disposed in plastic bag thrown behind logs and bushes near the shore. Yet, in spite of the experience of a hard life they were able to survive and sustained their family in the best way they can. My Wings… My conversation with Appreciative Inquiry (AI) started with my engagement with SAIDI. The small talk I had with Dean Rose became a “quest of inquiry”, seeking books…surfing web sites…finding conversation with AI practitioners sets my journey. However, for people who are used with “gaps” and problems my conversion to AI was never easy, I even write in one of my notes: “this cannot happen with the Filipinos considering its culture”. Because, I am personally stressed, burdened and is “heavy laden” of achieving goals, coping with the standard performance, “toeing on the line” on the proposal and log frame’s accomplishment…I seek a way of looking things around me…and, of “flying” beyond accomplishment, performance, work, proposals etc. and, seeking for answer on: what is the meaning of what we are doing? What changes have been made in my life and in the life of others? It is my journey with AI that I find inspiration, sense of fulfillment, reinforcing other lives and find the meaning of my being. When one is conversant with AI…one can see all human events the AI way. This “journal of journey” is my appreciation of LIFE!