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.