The Mega Manila Urban Population is about 26 million people. It is one of the densest populations in the world, about five times more dense than New York City.

The above photo is of a cathedral that escaped the severe bombing Manila took during World War II. It is in Intramuros, the breathing history of Manila within a walled city and overlain by a fort. The bombers used it as a landmark to position where they would drop their bombs, so they left the cathedral alone.

But the Philippines are mostly a study in colonialism. Over three hundred years under Spanish rule, during which the Spanish took all the best food and left ‘off-cuts’ for the local population. To this day, parts of the cuisine are dependent on off-cuts – bellies and intestines and fertilized eggs.

No one will say it this way, but the Philippines have been raped by religion. It has been ripped to pieces and violated so many times that you cannot trace this history with precision. Still a religious country, I wonder where colonialism ends and religion takes over, like a propagation of an ill. An untended wound that continues to stink.

Of course, the Americans colonized the Philippines too, and so that influence is here. People seem to want to leave. They want to find the American dream, and for that they must depart. Go abroad. Become rich in the way that you can’t here. A population waiting for an exit. Americans were only here for forty years, nothing like the Spanish, but their legacy is just as painful. Nanny me… I’ve yet to meet a person here who wants to go abroad to become a nanny, but I have friends in Canada who insist that when they can afford to have a nanny, it will be someone from the Philippines.

Colonial legacy is not a contest. None of it’s any good, but I wonder who’s had it worse than these people. When the Japanese were here in 1945 (they colonized this place, too), and they knew the war was done, they engaged in the Manila Massacre. One hundred thousand murdered in a short span of time. In the dungeon above, they have photos of the massacre victims. There are babies with bullet holes on the walls, lying next to their dead mothers. No one here is shying away from their past, however horrible.

The Spanish, the Americans, the Japanese… and then finally freedom, in the form of the Marcos family. From colonialism to a local dictatorship, where a single family ravaged this country and stole from it with abandon. Today, the son of Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Marcos (surely you remember the shoe lady – she’s a Senator here today, lives at the top of a penthouse that I drove by) is the President. How? A fantastic social media campaign that rewrote history and portrayed the time of Ferdinand and Imelda as the glory days of the Philippines, when they were anything but. Young people don’t remember what happened, they weren’t here. People who lived through it are too traumatized to stand up. History has been rewritten in a single generation.

The Pasig River stinks of sewage. On the other bank is Chinatown, the oldest one in the world, consigned to that bank because the Spanish didn’t want to live with the Chinese. A single man boats in the flow with a net, and I yelled at him: what are you hoping to collect from this horrid water? Garbage. He is collecting bottles and cans that are just underneath the flow. If you look closely, there is a river of recyclable content in this watercourse. This man uses two pieces of cardboard to paddle. That’s all.

The people here are wonderful. They are gentle. In school, they are taught by memorization, to conform, to comply. They do excellent work. They laugh a great deal, but they have been beaten down for almost four hundred years now, and to this day, they are subjugated by others. The traffic is horrendous. The infrastructure is on its last legs. There is always war here. Rebellions and seditions in the outlying areas, uncomfortable places to visit, while here in the capital, people shop like there’s no tomorrow and eat five times a day. You are your own inconsistencies. You are built up on a foundation of hypocrisy in a desire to be above the strife, and to find comfort in a world that is often so threatening, and that can at times have such a dire history.

The view from my hotel window. This is the richest area of the Philippines. Men with shotguns guard the gates. The money flow is intense amongst these trees, it almost looks like a suburb where I come from. I am looking out on this as I sit in an air conditioned room, twenty three floors above the solid ground where the rest of Mega Manila churns and contests with itself, decrepit shacks right next to state-of-the-art stadiums and shopping centres. There’s nothing left of old Manila except that cathedral and that fort. The rest was bombed pretty much into oblivion, savaged by religious zeal, whipped by a centuries-long colonial past, and then overtaken by a dictatorship that is very much alive today. Soon, it will be 30 million people in one city, right here. You can’t help that many people. You just can’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try.