Filipinos in the early 1500s were primarily farmers and traders. This is one of the reasons why a majority in the present day, 10 million Filipino people in Metro Manila, still reside around slums near public markets.
Life becomes difficult when you continually move from place to place to access clean water, food, or jobs. For our city dwellers not to be deprived of any one of these three, they needed a system that brought everything within their reach to start trading with other countries from all over Southeast Asia by land and sea routes. They created a kiosk-residence type, which became Manila's center point where all population flowed into during breaks between work periods and always found a comfortable room to rest.
For the average Filipino to survive, they needed to produce crops for food and clothing, build their own house, teach English or Spanish in exchange for money with foreigners who came to Manila. These were the first livelihood skills that Filipinos developed before modern technologies were introduced.
