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.