The land of a thousand ways of suffering

Translation courtesy of Dario Fioravanti

It was the year 1994 and I was 16, when a remote African country virtually unknown to South Americans suddenly echoed in the news. I must say that almost nothing is published about Africa in my country, so I barely remember that moment, but what I do remember is that it was a new tragic story coming from the black continent (after all, bad news is all we hear from Africa). What I did not know until much later in my life was the magnitude of the tragedy that was taking place in Rwanda in those days, which made it unavoidable to get to this tiny country with a picture of deep grief.

Volcanoes, solitary bays and rice fields

Manila the ugly

Entering and leaving big cities by bicycle is rarely a pleasant experience and Manila is not the exception. Actually it is the perfect expression of the immense stress that involves such process. Manila is a huge sprawling city of millions of inhabitants and for both entering and leaving we had to ride all across it. Like it's always the case with poor countries, it isn't a city of harmony but one of huge and harsh contrasts. There are no greys in Manila, it is rich or poor, it is immaculate or filthy, it is spacious or crammed, it is ostentatious or plain misery and unfortunately, the negative connotations are the ones that predominate in the virtually infinite horizons of this huge metropolis. The fact that a big city has big contrasts and negative connotations isn't a surprise, especially in Asia, but many of them, despite having them, they still preserve some kind of hidden beauty in them, some charm, even when poverty and misery is what predominates. Manila doesn't even have the slightest appeal, it is simply ugly from wherever you look at it, from wherever you walk on it or cycle on it.