PRESIDENT Joseph Estrada does not know this woman. Nor does she know him. She did not even vote for him, and she had no reason to celebrate his inauguration.

But Purificacion ''Puring'' Viernes has an urgent message for Estrada, and she hopes he will listen. She has come all the way from Iligan City alone, this woman who is doomed to walk on crutches the rest of her life because one day in 1984 overzealous paramilitary men fired upon her hut, killing her husband and two of her four children, and leaving her almost dead.

Ferdinand Marcos and his Martial Law did that to her family, she says. That is why when Estrada announced that he was allowing Marcos's burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, she just had to take the first boat to Manila. She wanted to tell him that in Mindanao where she lives and works there are many widows and orphans, all of them victims of Martial Law like herself, and they remember Marcos and the inhumanity of his regime. He is no hero to us, she says, and it would be very unfair to us if he were to be honored as one.

Since arriving in Manila, 49-year-old Puring has been facing the media, telling her story over and over again. No tears blur her memories, but she feels, she says, a little fear. Martial Law did that to her. It taught her fear, but it also taught her courage.

This is her story.

Maid

Born and raised in Tipan, Minacaban, Misamis Occidental, the eldest of eight daughters, Puring got only as far as grade six because her father, a farmer, did not believe girls needed an education. At 15, she left home to work as househelper in General Santos City, Cotabato. She earned P16 a month, a lot of money in those days, she says, because one could buy three salop of corn for a peso.

In 1966 she went to Manila and found work as maid again, this time for a couple who not only treated their househelp well but also required them to read books and newspapers and engaged them in discussions of the day's issues.

 One day they were taken along on a tour of Malacanang, because, Puring recalls, their male employer was a customs inspector who was close to the Marcoses.

Puring met the man who would become her husband when her employers sent her to work in their farm in General Santos. Orlando Viernes was working there, too. An Ilocano farmer's son who had to drop out of school after fourth grade, he had gone to Cotabato in search of work. He took pride in the fact that his father knew President Marcos.

Puring married Orlando when she was 18. He was a good man, she says, and a hard worker who knew farming and carpentry. Home was wherever his job took them, but by the time their third child was born, they had settled in Pagadian, Zamboanga del Sur. That was where Marcos's Presidential Decree 1081, which proclaimed Martial Law on Sept. 21, 1972, caught them.

Puring will never forget that day. Orlando came home late that night with a shirt wrapped around his head. She was afraid he had figured in a fight, but it turned out he was merely hiding the closely cropped haircut he said some soldiers had forced him to have.

Trauma

The reality of Martial Law would hit the Vierneses hard that year.

Orlando was arrested by the Philippine Constabulary on suspicion of being a member of the Ilaga, a group of anti-Muslim Christian fanatics. He was subsequently released, but the trauma of that experience made him and Puring decide to move to Ozamis, Misamis Occidental, where they would be far from the Christian-Muslim conflict.

Orlando became a kaingin farmer in barangay Carmen, Jimenez, at the foot of Mt. Malindang. Life was unchanging, until a group of young people came in 1975. They introduced themselves as students of the University of the Philippines, but they didn't give their full names. They were looking for Tagalog-speaking people who could help them communicate with the predominantly Cebuano-speaking community.

Puring and Orlando spoke Tagalog, she even better than he. They became the visitors' translators, going with them everywhere as they explained Martial Law, the people's war, the revolutionary movement. The visitors were good people, she says, and very intelligent, and they carried no arms.

They remained in Carmen for four years, organizing the farmers so that they could rid their barangay of thieves and promote peace within and among the families. The young strangers taught the villagers acupuncture and how to make herbal medicine. To people who had to walk 16 kilometers to reach the nearest hospital, such new knowledge was a Godsend.

''Masaya kami. Nakita namin ang unity ng isang barangay,'' Puring says of those years.

Suspicion

But while life in Carmen improved, the barangay also drew the suspicion of the military. They were coddling rebels, the people were warned. Some of them fled their farms in fear, but Orlando and his family chose to stay.

In 1980 a mission team of Redemptorist priests arrived in the parish. Orlando and Puring, grateful for the good life they were now enjoying---a productive farm complete with a cow, chickens and pigs that would ensure their children a good education---volunteered to help the priests. Together they organized small Christian communities called Gagmayng Kristohanong Katilingban.

The mission introduced a community-based health program and taught the people how to make soap, cooking oil and soy sauce. The people themselves set up a system of barter, trading their fruits, vegetables and corn for palay, fish and bagoong in other barangays. Later on, they would adopt Orlando's suggestion that they start a communal farm . They had truly become not only self-reliant, but also self-sufficient.

But this was the 1980s in Mindanao, and it did not matter that Martial Law had been officially lifted in 1981. The people had to contend not only with a suspicious military, but with new groups of fanatics like the Tadtad and powerful Civilian Home Defense Forces (CHDF). The latter monitored the activities of Church leaders, both religious and lay.

The mayor of Jimenez told the people of Carmen that they were all rebels and that their church was the frontline of the New People's Army. Number one on his watchlist was Puring Viernes. When told to stop her church activities, she snapped, ''Do you expect us to pray the rosary the whole day? We have to teach people how to survive.''

Blood

On March 31, 1984, a Sunday, Orlando and Puring and three of their children went to sleep early. Their eldest child, Cecilia, was spending the night in her grandmother's house. At 10 that evening, Orlando and Puring heard men shouting outside their house. They were asking for food. The couple had gotten used to requests of that sort from CHDF men prowling the area at night. Rolando lit the gas lamp and went downstairs. Then he heard the sounds of Armalite and Garand fire, and he quickly went back inside the house. He told Puring to lie very still and not to wake up the children.

Puring recalls the next scene as if it happened only yesterday: The men, about 14 of them, had surrounded the house and were now firing simultaneously. Orlando and the two younger children, nine-year-old Rolando and six-year-old Marita, died instantly. ''Ang dugo bumaha na sa baba. (The blood had seeped through the bamboo floor.)'' Puring could feel her flour sack blanket drenched with blood.

As she lay still, she could hear the men saying they would set the house on fire. One of them entered the kitchen and put the lighted gas lamp under her left foot. He wanted to see if she was alive. Convinced everyone was dead, the men left.

The bullets had mercifully spared Marites. Puring quietly told her not to move. They both lay on the bed until the men left an hour later, after releasing yet another burst of gunfire, shattering the bone in Puring's right leg.

At four in the morning, Puring told Marites to run to her grandparents' house for help. The girl had to cross the river rather than risk taking the road. There was no time to grieve, Puring says when asked how she felt then. She had lost a lot of blood but, she says, she felt not pain, but numbness. All she could think of was that she had to live long enough to tell her story.

''Nakipag-deal ako sa Diyos. Sana buhayin ako, para makapagsalita naman ako, para matapos na ito. Bahala na pagkatapos noon, mamatay na kung mamatay. Siguro bubuhayin naman ng mga kasama ko ang dalawa kong anak.''

Shattered bone

Kind neighbors carried Puring in a hammock all the way to the hospital. The doctors gave her a 50-50 chance of surviving. She had lost 2,000 cc of blood, even though she had tied a piece of cloth around her wounded leg immediately after the shooting to control the bleeding.

Orlando, Rolando and Marita had to be buried without Puring. For the next nine months she remained in hospital, undergoing surgery almost every month to remove pieces of shattered bone from her leg and thigh. It was better, the priests around her said, than having the leg amputated.

Her friends in the Church were steadfast in their support: the Columban fathers shouldered all her hospitalization expenses and the costs of burying her dead, and the sisters looked after Cecilia and Marites.

Once out of the hospital, Puring and her two daughters were invited to live in the sisters' convent. The priests and nuns also helped Puring pursue her case against the killers. But, she says, nothing happened.

Three of the CHDF members she was able to identify were arrested in 1986. One of them was her own neighbor, whose two children she had sent to school. Two of those arrested escaped from prison and were killed---by the NPA, so the rumor went. The third was released from prison but was also subsequently killed. The mayor who had instigated the massacre himself died in an ambush.

Move on

It was not the kind of justice Puring had sought. But life, she told herself, had to go on.

Nothing has ever come easy for this woman. Her recovery and rehabilitation were no exception. Learning to move around and to do chores on crutches, difficult as that was, proved to be easier than overcoming depression, anger and pain. But she has been healed, she says, and today, 14 years after the tragedy, she can truthfully say that her broken self has been made whole again.

It is a new Puring, in fact, that people see now. Since losing Orlando, Rolando and Marita, she has been concentrating on helping other victims of militarization. She joined the Lanao Alliance of Human Rights Advocates and the movement for Christian-Muslim dialogue. She worked part-time in her parish's family life program and then full- time as health worker in the Cotabato interfaith program for health concerns.

For the past few years, she has been active in the Mindanao Lay Forum or Kalami, which created the Amaya Lay Foundation to help women widowed by the conflict in Mindanao through income-generating projects and their deserving children through scholarships. As chair for the Dipolog-Ozamis-Pagadian-Iligan and Marawi area and treasurer for all of Mindanao, Puring has found herself, a simple sixth grader, sharing views with religious persons and professionals at various conferences.

All this work Puring has been doing as a volunteer receiving only a small allowance. Her needs are few, her wants simple---just a sewing machine and a karaoke to call her own in the small place she shares with Cecilia in Iligan City. Both Cecilia and Marites went to college and are earning their keep now.

Two years ago, Puring received the Aurora Aragon Quezon Peace Award for her work in promoting peace through development. Some of her co-workers have suggested that she sign up with President Erap's reform program JEEP (Justice, Economy, Environment and Peace) so that she can help Amaya's scholars more. But, she says, she is not interested.

For the new President, she has only this simple message: ''We exist. We are your poor. We were Marcos's victims, and we want justice.''