He wants to save the Philippines. The fact that he is white, green-eyed and British doesn’t stop him from being as Filipino as Juan de la Cruz.
His story is straight out of a storybook – and he tells it like a born storyteller. "I was born to a poor family but being poor in England is very different from being poor in the Philippines. Even though we were poor by English standards, I still got free education, free health care, I got three meals a day – I know in the Philippines you like to eat seven times or eight times – but three was enough for me." His eyes sparkles with laughter.
"Then at the age of 20 I took a loan from the Prince’s Trust. It was a trust to help young people start businesses and it was about P250,000. When I sold that business five years ago, it made me the 9th richest man in Britain under the age of thirty."
Called part of the "New Net Rich" by The Guardian, among those who "who have reshaped corporate Britain," his is a rags-to-riches story that is celebrated throughout the UK.
"I remember lying awake in my bed one night in the Beverly Hills Hotel where I was staying. I was wondering why even though I had everything in life at that time – I had a Ferrari, I had a Porsche, I had a BMW – my life felt incomplete. And I realized the big difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is like a fire that you have to fuel – you always need something new to feel good. Happiness really comes from within. So, in the same way that you can walk around the slums of the Philippines and almost hear the prayer of the poor: "Lord, why am I poor?" that night I started to pray "Lord, why am I rich?"
So he traveled the world, looking for causes he could help. "But I became more and more disappointed, because every program looked like it was failing or it could never make a substantial impact on a country. Every slum I went to was still a slum, every project in the third world looked like a third world project." At the end of 2002, a friend of his, a Filipina, visited him in England. When he went to meet her, she admitted to feeling guilty about her trip, because for the price of a plane ticket, she could have built two houses for the poor in the Philippines.
"And so I thought, what kind of houses are these that cost the same as a handbag in England?" He was half joking, half-serious. "How poor are these people living in handbags in Manila?"
When he went to the Philippines, he knew nothing beyond the Abu Sayyaf, Smokey Mountain and Imelda’s shoes. "The first thing I did was go to Smokey Mountain and when I saw the scale of the problem there, I just wanted to sit down in the middle of the road and I thought ‘Where do you begin?’"
One thought struck him, in the middle of the hopelessness: that if the slums were manmade, they could be man un-made. So he went to two Gawad Kalinga sites. What he saw changed his life. "I went into this place that used to be a slum, but was now a beautiful, peaceful place, nobody was drinking in the streets, nobody was fighting, and nobody was taking drugs. Everybody was painting houses or playing with their children or talking."
He caught a plane back to England, and when he got home, he looked at the brand- new BMW he had just bought himself.
"I suddenly felt sick, because I realized how that one BMW is worth about 80 houses back in the Philippines. How can I decide, now that I’ve seen an answer to poverty – or that I believed was an answer in my heart – that my driving is more important than the lives of 600 people who could live in those houses? I couldn’t stand to look at the BMW so I sold it, and we now built that village in April 2003." A mischievous look appears on his face.
"It’s called the BMW Village."
The village is located in San Jose, Bulacan, where the British flag flies next to the Philippine flag to celebrate the partnership between the two nations.
"We send about 20-50 people into a site almost every day for two to five years to take away not just the slum but also the slum mentality of people. Because when people have lived in a slum environment, they have slum habits. They have slum behavior. They have a slum mentality. That takes a long time to take away especially if they’ve been there for two or three generations. It’s not as simple as building a house. We know if you build a house and then leave, we will fail. It will be a slum again in six months.
"We have to really transform the people. And this is what makes Gawad Kalinga unique."
They learned their lesson the hard way. In the beginning they would immediately give ownership of the house to the poor. They were disappointed when some of them would immediately sell the house, buy a karaoke machine or a big TV and then go live to a slum somewhere else. Now, they’re not allowed to sell the house for a minimum of five years and they can only sell with the agreement of GK (and only for good reasons).
"The amazing thing is just after a few months; they no longer want to sell the house, because they get used to their children going to school. They get used to people helping. They get used to living in a peaceful place. And they can no longer go back and live in another slum somewhere."
Many Filipinos have taken up with the crusade. There are personalities like Cory Aquino, who built three villages in Tarlac, and Greggy Araneta who gave P15 million in a village in Bulacan.
"We are working with Senators Kiko Pangilinan and Ed Angara, the leaders of opposite parties. They are rivals in the Senate, but they’re brothers in nation-building. We are working with McDonald’s; Jollibee also wants to help. We’re working with Smart, they’re building with lots of villages, and Globe also wants to help. There is hope. These are people who hate each other! They see something that’s beyond their own corporate value, to go for something more important."
They have built what is called the Highway of Peace in Muslim Mindanao: In places like Datu Paglas and Camp Abubakar. For the first time in 30 years, Muslims and Christians are building side by side. The MILF building are houses along with government troops in Datu Paglas. They have finished 14 villages.
"Camp Abubakar is the place where former President Estrada declared all-out war in the year 2000… we went there and declared all—out peace. We’re building 180 houses for the poor victims in that place."
He has fallen in love with the Filipino. "What I’ve learned first of all is that Filipinos are such a wonderful people. I didn’t know anything about the country before I came here, but what I’ve come to see is that you have so many special qualities that Filipinos really take for granted, or don’t even recognize.
"Like bayanihan. It’s such a beautiful word – we don’t even have that word in English – it means to be a hero to each other. It also a shame to me," he says wryly, "that when my ancestors were thinking up of ways of killing and conquering the world, your ancestors were building the Rice Terraces, the only wonder of the world built on cooperation, not slavery."
"What do you think of our women?" I asked. The answer came quickly. "Filipinas are the most beautiful women in the world," he declared. "Filipino men are some of the luckiest men in the world, I hope they realize it."
I promised to inform them very, very soon.
He realized it firsthand, having recently married his beautiful wife Anna. "You have some very wonderful words that show the richness of the Filipino people. There are words, some very emotional words, like kilig, before with my wife I used to get kilig, but I didn’t know what it was!" He laughs. "Now I know I was kilig!"
"I really see the Philippines as my home. I have just found out that my wife is pregnant and I’ve made the decision that I want to raise my children here. It will be very easy to take my children and wife to England and give them a very good life there. But there will always be a part of themselves that will be missing.
"The best thing I can do for them is raise them here, and do whatever I can to help the country rise, so they will be proud not just of their English side, but proud of their Filipino side, proud of bayanihan – all those wonderful traits of Filipinos – they can eat balut if they want, I won’t stop them."
"Do you?"
He answers with a very vehement "No!" accompanied by a disgusted grimace. "No way! I think I have a Filipino heart but an English stomach."
"Can I take a picture?" I asked. "I love your shirt."
He laughed. "You’ll love the back better."
He turned around. Printed on the back were the words "Bawat Pilipino, Bayani."
"It will be a long process. It will be the greatest battle of our lifetime, of this generation’s lifetime. There is no world war now. The war is against poverty. But house after house, slum after slum, we will transform this country."