One of the most eye-opening experiences of my life was during February 2015when I landed in Manila.
My trip to the Philippines was the first time I had been to a country that was not part of what you would term the ‘developed’ world.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, and when I left the airport and hopped into a taxi to make my way to my accommodation, I was blown away by what I saw.
In my previous 25 years, I had never come face to face with abject poverty. I had seen homeless people, and rundown areas in Australia, England and New Zealand, but nothing on the scale of what I saw in Manila.
Here, I was in a completely different world, where the trappings of wealth were reserved for the lucky few.
As the taxi snaked its way through the city to my hotel, there was barely an area that had not been devoured by concrete.
All I could see was a concrete jungle, with towers pervading into the sky, and roads stretching into the distance.
As I looked upwards, the sky was heavy with smog. Fumes from the millions of cars that slowly edged their way around the city polluting the atmosphere.
It was a new and unsettling experience.
As the days passed I couldn’t get over how much smog and pollution there was in the…
