After about a week that I was there the volunteers began to openly voice their concerns about the social worker, Carla. She was supposed to be in charge of running the whole centre in addition to her duties as social worker. But she was doing no work at all. The centre was in absolute chaos. Now I think the girls were too concerned about helping the kids to leave outright. I also had paid my $250 for the month and wanted to at least get my money´s worth.

On the Thursday of the second week Susanne and Marge looked at receipts which Carla had written out and realised that she had been stealing money from the CPeru accounts by writing out receipts for non-existent expenses and overstating the cost of other expenses occurred. For example she wrote out a receipt for a birthday party for some children, but there had never been any party. She got caught because she filed away copies of the fraudulent receipts instead of just writing out new receipts which tallied with the expenses that volunteers new had been incurred. There was no way that the supposed managers of the charity could check the accounts or the receipts, they merely relied on Carla´s word on it. Carla got away with it for almost two months after the charity was first formed because the volunteers all assumed that the organization was better run than it actually was. All the volunteers were new and did not know how the organisation was supposed to function. The only people who perhaps could have realised sooner were Roger and Marco. But they considered Carla to be a good friend and for that reason, I think, they just ignored the evidence in front of them.

Marge voiced her concers to the other volunteers and to two of the overseas ´managers´of CPeru, Bart and Emma. On Sunday evening we had a series of meetings to discuss the proble punctuated by telephone conversations between Bart and Marge, Susanne and Carla. After two hours Carla was ´sacked´over the phone. She defended herself to us tearfully and convincingly. I believe they were real tears, perhaps tears of shame, or perhaps just tears at being caught. She denied stealing the money, she looked and sounded very convincing, but the evidence was over whelmingly aganst her. She stayed a night more then packed her bags during the day with her tearful son by her side. She left that evening and cried as she hugged me goodbye.

That evening I talked to Roger and Marco in Roger´s front room (turned into a temporary office for our project) about CPeru closing down. Roger was very angry, he wanted to evict CPeru from his family´s property and have it closed down. It turned out that CPeru was neither registered as a charity in Peru nor in Europe. So they had employed Carla illegally and put all the volunteers in danger. The accounts they used were in the name of Emma (who is not even a Peruvian citizen but Irish), and I don´t think the founders had any way of being able to monitor the accounts from back in Europe. Marco is a lawyer by trade and he helped Carlato report CPeru at the employment ministry and gain a substantial amount of compensation. I don´t know how much, I would only be guessing, nor do I know if Marco received a fee for his services.

Overall it was a difficult experience for me. I had a rotten time in CPeru and I wasted my $250. I was put in considerable danger not only with the conditions in the centre but with Carla. She could have decided to ´wreak revenge´on the volunteers for denouncing her or put up a fuss about leaving and turned violent. Anything could have happened. I´m angry with Carla for taking advantage of the situation and also with Marco for helping her and then later pretending that he wasn´t involved. But I´m most angry with Bart, Emma and the other founders of CPeru. They screwed us all over big time. I´m amazed that they invested so much money in it, but so little time establishing a systems of organisation, accountability and guidelines. The Peruvian staff had no idea of their responsibilities, they had never been told what to do or what was expected of them. So it was not thair fault that they didn´t do their jobs properly.

I agreed to volunteer again at the new organisation assuming that it was well run, on a sound legal footing and thinking that the new managers would learn from the mistakes made by Bruce. I thought that they would be more caring of volunteers and more professional and competant in their approach. I was wrong. I feel cheated because they failed to tell me the state of things on the ground, that the charity was unregistered, that they had only just taken it over and that they did not have guidelines or any sort of guiding philosophy in place. They just signed the papers with Bruce, set up a bank account and pretty much left straight away. Perhaps in thinking that they could manage and run a charity in Peru, by themselves, they were as stupid as I was in thinking I could set up and run a successful business venture in Peru. But at least I didn´t try to do it from thousands of miles away and at least I didn´t put anyone else in danger. I only put my money on the line, if one of the kids had been hurt by that falling water tank, or if one of the volunteers had become severely ill the consequences could have been tragic.

So I quit my job at the supermarket, said goodbye to my family and took a flight from London to Lima in early February 2005. I was met by Roger at the airport and we stayed overnight at his Aunt´s house in San Borja. The next day we set off by bus to Cajamarca arriving early the next morning. I had decided to stay at the old charity centre again. I planned to work casually as a volunteer and do just enough work to be able to stay. Then spend the rest of my time working on the project at Huacariz farm with Roger. So when we arrived in Cajamarca and met the other volunteers. Alongside Carla the social worker there was Susanne, Marge a chirpy girl of about 25 from Cork in Ireland, Megan, a pleasant 18 year old girl from Wales who is very tall and stands out like a sore thumb walking the streets of Cajamarca and Heather a very kind and amiable girl from Austin, Texas.

The centre had recently changed hands. Bruce had been a terrible leader and most of the volunteers had had problems with him. In December of 2004 Bruce had agreed to allow four volunteers to take over the general running of the school and had handed the books over to them. But when I arrived there were clearly many problems with the way the centre was being run. Firstly, none of the volunteers who had agreed to take over the running of the centre stayed to actually manage it. They all went back to Europe to study or work and left Carla in charge of the accounts and of the day to day running of the centre. They also employed a new cook, an acid tongued secretary called Estella and a cleaner (a nephew of Mallaneo´s) called Moreno, a boy of 16 or 17 and not much older than the kids themselves.

It took me two or three days to realise something was very wrong. For starters the place just wasn´t being cleaned properly. The walls of the corner of the kitchen where the stove was had acquired a think layer of soot. At first I didn´t think too much of it, I just thought it was supposed to be like that. But the cook was using the orange flame of the gas ring to cook and she never cleaned the kitchen. The food itself was absolutely atrocious, she never bought proper meat, always chicken scraps. We had chicken feet soup a few times. When we asked her about this it turned out she was given very little money by Carla to buy food with even though there should have been plenty of money available. There was nobody to sort this out, or tell the cook what to do because the Carla wasn´t doing her job and because she wasn´t accountable to anyone. The volunteers all ate out in restaurants at lunch time instead, unluckily for the kids they didn´t have that option. Added to that Moreno couldn´t clean or do his job properly because he didn´t have any proper cleaning equipment, there was not even any floor detergent or even, I believe, a mop.

Looking back it was lucky nobody ended up dead or in hospital. Conditions in the centre were unhygenic and there were other safety hazards. In one incident a hot water tank fell off the wall on the same spot where just a few minutes before the kids were washing their hands before going home. Somebody could easily have been seriously hurt of killed if the tank had hit them. The place wasn´t being maintained and kept properly. Added to that all the volunteers were ill, I was violently sick for a couple of days, probably because I tried some of the awful food. I was even sick on my bed and my sleeping bag. But there was nobody there to help me, no support system in place for volunteers.

I expect that the incredulous reader is now wondering why I did it. Didn´t I think about the risks? Didn´t I realise that it was probably all just a scam? Didn´t I realise that if I didn´t end up getting killed I would lose all my money? Didn´t I think that not having any kind of business experience, or understanding of agriculture, engineering or even a reasonable knowledge of Spanish would make thinks very difficult for me? The answer to these questions is that I simply didn´t dwell too much on the obvious risks involved. The idea of going to Peru to do this tapped into my juvenile desire to do something exciting, adventurous and glamourous. The idea that I could possibly make some money from this too was interesting to me also, because if I did it would be a triumph, something nobody else in my position had really done before. Going to Peru to do this was a more enticing option than simply staying back in Britain. Although it obviously sounds crazy I thought that trying to build a successful company in Peru might have been the way to fulfil all my desires. After all my prospects at home seemed pretty poor. I thought that if the project worked out I would have 'cheated the system'. I would have done something different, original and 'outside the box'. I thought it would be a huge acheivement and I also thought that it was one worth pursuing. And if it didn´t work out, I reasoned, well at least I tried! I don´t know if all this sounds at all rational to the reader, but these really were my thoughts a tthe time.

I kept what I was doing a secret from everyone. My family and my friends still no absolutely nothing about it. I told them that I was going travelling in South America with my friends. And that´s what they all think I was doing between February and October of 2005. This is actually the first attempt I have ever made to fully explain what I did and what happened. Roger also has not told his family or his wife (then girlfriend) about what we did. So the whole thing was carried out pretty much in secret from all our family and friends. Although I´m sure some of the volunteers at the children´s centre suspected something, nobody ever asked us any direct questions about it, we were mainly left to our own nefarious devices.

Decision

During this time I was correponding by email with Roger. In late November 2004 he mentioned a few projects he was considering. One involved buying a property in the city of Cajamarca and turning it into a hotel. Another was to build up a herd of cattle and sell the milk to Nestle (Nestle does in fact by milk in Peru). Another far more ambitious project we talked about was growing and processing Tara (Peru is a major exporter of this product apparently used in the leather industry). But this would have required expensve heavy machinery and other high costs. We didn´t have the capital for that one.

After thinking about it back in England, and seriously wondering if I was crazy for even contemplating this I came to an agreement with Roger. The option we decided upon was growing a crop called Alfalfa. The English term for it is Medic, but I will refer to it in the Spanish, Alfalfa. I had never heard of it before so I did a google search on it and found out it´s a crop which is grown all over the world but is especially fast growing in tropical regions and is used as cattle and animal feed. Although it´s a very cheap crop so we would have to produce it in bulk. Alfalfa requires a lot of water to grow properly. Now, because it only rains seven or eight months a year in Cajamarca our project involved buying a pump and sprinkler system to water the Alfalfa plants from a well during the dry months. I would invest the money to buy the equipment whilst we would use Roger´s land on which to grow the Alfalfa. However, we would only use the land for four years, after this the pump and the equipment could be used in a different project somewhere else and the land would be sold off. I would travel to Cajamarca to live, and we would execute the project together. Roger was able to recruit Yessenia, the secretary at Bruce Peru at the time, to come and work with us and eventually to manage the day-to-day running of the project when we were gone.

I went back to Britian in September. I had only been away for three months but I experienced quite a deep reverse culture shock, I felt lost and completely blown away. I thought that I was starting out again back home with a blank canvas. But in reality I had no real ideas, no contacts, little money and a lot of problems. I was living back with my parents near Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire. The family moved there originally just a couple of months before I started out at university, so I dont have any roots or any friends there. I felt isolated and lonely even with my family around me. My attempts to get a job in a Fair Trade shop all failed, the best I could do was a volunteer position at a shop in a village half an hour away from Bangor in North Wales where I went to university. I was left totally disheartened. The only paid job I could get was working on the tills at a supermarket.

To cap it off my parents house is quite away outside town. its a fifteen minute walk to the nearest village, and from there you have to rely on the buses to get to Stratford (unless you drive, which I couldnt). My parents tried their best to help. They always try their best for me, but it was no good. It is an unnerving feeling that you want to be away from your family even though you love them and they love you.

Part of the reason why I was inspired to travel abroad was my dislike of where I am from. Stratford upon Avon is a great place to visit, but living there is quite different. I found the banal middle class lifestyle to be suffocating and depressing. I am deathly afraid of ending up a boring, middle aged old man living somewhere in middle England. A man like this has a good salary or maybe owns his own business. He lives in a pretty cottage in an expensive village miles from anywhere. He has an ugly wife and two teenage children with very expensive tastes. From the outside he seems to be successful but inside he is desperately unhappy, unfulfilled and spiritually vacuous. He is rude and arrogant and has an often patronising manner. His attitude is materialistic, his outlook on life is characterised by a sense of false optimism, fake smiles and false dawns. He enjoys going to the pub to drink real ale and talk to other boring men about football, or about how stupid American people are, or about house prices. Men like my neighbours, my old boss at the supermarket, my barber or the local solicitor. If you are English you will know exactly the type of man I am talking about, you may even be that type of man yourself. Well, subconciously I think I have have always been motivated to avoid becoming that type of person. To do something exciting and exotic instead of just wasting away in a boring old English suburb.

Plans

Roger and I got on very well and we became good friends. One day we got talking about about some business ideas that he had. His degree is Economics from the national University of Lima. His father also owns several businesses, a number of farms I believe, a trucking business and a few other interests. He is an entrepenuer I suppose and Roger wanted to follow suit. Roger had been brought up as a priveledged and confident person with a great future ahead of him in business. He was at that time very ambitious and he wanted to eventually strike out on his own and not always be so reliant on his familys money. His father and his uncles had built up the family wealth from scratch, Rogers father (the family patriarch) had worked hard his whole life. Indeed he is still working now even though he must be a sectogenarian I guess. Out of the two of us Roger has by far the most ability, of course he also had a good knowledge of the business we eventually undertook whereas I had none. I think he wanted to work with me initially because I had some money (he didnt want to borrow from his father), because he wrongly thought I had access to low interest credit abroad, and I think also because he thought he could trust me.

Anyway, I had a dream of my own. My idea was to go back to Britain and build towards setting up my own shop selling Fair Trade goods from abroad which I then envisaged I could grow into a big business. Of course it was a total Pie in the Sky idea with absolutely no chance of actually happening. But at the time I was foolish enough to really believe it could be done. I was an idiot. On the other hand many people (not just children but otherwise sane adults also) have crazy dreams. For example to be a famous pop star, or actor, or writer, or set up their own successful business and be rich. But these dreams are often impossible to fulfill. My dream was to save the planet through Fair Trade and make a lot of money in the process. But Rogers ideas seemed sound to me so before I left to Britain I gave him $500 to invest for me in the hope of receiving $800 in three months time. Was I crazy to give this guy I met in Peru $500 to invest in shares? Yes I was! That was just the beginning though. Although I have ended up losing about half my money I invested I have not been scammed. I believe also that Roger has always been honest with me, although I could be wrong I suppose. After all he has lied to many people before, for example lied to his family and to Susanne extensively about the project we undertook together. But back then I trusted him, and for the most part I still do.

You have to understand that I was just 21 years old at this point and that I was a real head in the clouds dreamer. I was a delusional person who wanted to do exciting things with my life, but was not sure how to start.

The charity

At the time I was working at the charity I had just graduated from university. Looking back at myself and what I was like at the time I realise that I was still very naive about the world and about other people. I probably still am. I had no idea about women and I foolishly fell for the caprices of another volunteer at the centre. It was easily done I suppose because we were all working, socialising and living with each other pretty much 24 hours a day. Her name was Diana, very pretty and good fun of Peruvian Japanese decent and about my own age. Apparently many Japanese emigrated to Latin America at the start of the last century and there are sizable Japanese communities in places like Lima and Sao Paulo. All the Peruvian Japanese girls I have ever met have been utterly stunning, its a good racial mix I think. Her skin was a rich choclatey brown, like most Japanese girls she was svelt and slim. She always had a smile on her face and was unfailingly kind to all the kids at the centre and to all the other volunteers. She still is, I think, one of the most genuinely kind generous people I have ever met. She was also coquettish, which I think was a bit lost to me at the time. So I became infatuated with her and I was pretty devasted at the time when she left the centre. So were the kids, most of them broke down wailing on her last day and all the other volunteers and staff had tears in their eyes. The kids felt loved by her and attracted towards her and perhaps felt a bit rejected and lost when she left.

Although I know that the children really enjoyed going to the centre. They were well fed which they needed to supplement their diet at home, and they received some education and help with homework etc. Most of all I think they enjoyed the attention of volunteers who cared for them, I suspect many of them werent cared for too well or loved too much at home. Volunteers came to work there for a few short months only so they usually gave their all into helping the kids and making them feel special. The volunteers were often idealistic and very passionate about helping poor street children. As a result the kids received a lot of love and attention, but perhaps not too much actual help. Volunteers were constantly coming and going, each with their own new ideas about how to change and improve the organisation of the centre. So much so that good ideas and projects were often lost when a new group of volunteers arrived and initiated their own ideas. Also, unfairly in my view, volunteers often developed strong relationships with the kids (i.e Diana and others) only for the volunteer to leave after a few months and the child to feel very down about that and perhaps subsequently leave the centre. Those kids are vulnerable and perhaps need a relationship with an adult who will always be there for them.

The Start

This whole saga started three years ago in summer 2004 really whilst I was working as a volunteer with poor street children in the city of Cajamarca in the Andean mountain range of northern Peru which is the main location for my story. Children working (and sometimes living) on the street is one of the great social problems of Latin America, and is something I have always believed is a terrible and preventable tragedy. Although to tell the truth the organisation I worked for did very little to help anyone out. I personally was able to contribute very little to helping the kids because my Spanish was so bad. But I met some really lovely people there, the kids were very lively and I loved watching them play and invent little games amongst themselves. The Peruvian volunteers and other international were hard working and good fun also. But no doubt the Peruvian men who frequented the centre were all after the blonde volunteers from Sweden and the U.S as an exotic sexual conquest, all under the sad delusion that they were available.

It was here where I met Roger Diaz Guerra, the man who plays such an integral part of this story. He lived next door to the centre, in fact the centre was rented from his family. His father was usually away in Lima on business and his mother had recently died. At 25 years old he lived a bit of a playboy lifestyle on an allowance from his father I think. The house where he lived back then is very large and right in the centre of Cajamarca, close to many restaurants, bars and diskotecs. So he went to parties, either with the volunteers or with other friends, every night. If he ever wanted something like a discounted meal or a free room for a night in another city, or advice he always had his family´s vast number of contacts to help him out (the kind of contacts that I´ve never had for some reason). He is a talented and well educated man who seems to understand everything and, at that time, seemed to have everything come so easily and naturally to him. Most of all he was very very charming, gregarious and fun to be with. He took the volunteers regularly in his truck to the family ranch at Huacariz to play football and have barbecues etc. He took us once up to the mountains above Cajamarca at night to see a spectacular view of the city. He seemed very comfortable and at ease in social situations. So it was sometimes difficult not to envy him a little bit, he seemed to have everything right there on a plate for him.

For some reason he has always preferred white skinned, blonde western women to women of his own race. He was one of the few Peruvian men (infamous for their macho, possessive attitudes) I knew who was able to impress the female volunteers. When I asked him why that was he told me it was because he was tired of Peruvian girls. But I don´t believe him. To my knowledge the only serious girlfriends he has ever been with have been European. His friend from universty Miguel told me later on that Roger had only dated one girl whist at university in Lima, a Swede (I don´t know her name). Despite the urgings of his friends he refused to try other girls (the consumate womaniser Miguel was incredulous that Roger did that). He had fallen madly in love with her, but she later chose to return permanently to Sweden without him. I think he may have had his heart broken, although I have never broached this subject with Roger.

Roger later dated (and eventually married) a German girl Susanne. When he was staying with her in Germany in late 2005 he proposed a scheme to me whereby he would pay for me to travel to Gothenburg Sweden to secretly help him track down and drop in unexpected to surprise his ex girlfriend. He needed my help because he doesn´t speak a word of Swedish and he thought he needed my English skills to help him navigate his way around the city. Now I don´t know how much Susanne knows about the ex girlfriend from Sweden, but I´m sure that deep down Roger still pines for her (even though I´m sure he is in love with Susanne). Talk about a passionate Latin lover!!