Working the fields

The hotel I went to after I left Inca Wasi is owned by a aunt of Roger´s. I paid five dollars a night for a pretty nice en-suite room with television right in the city centre on Apurimac street near the main market. It was comfortable and clean, but the street outside was dangerous at night.



At Huacariz we started off by hiring labourers to dig up all the weeds which covered the fields where we wanted to sow our Alfalfa. We only paid them ten soles (about three U.S dollars) a day to do this. Although ten soles is a typical wage in Peru I still feel bad about doing that because it´s clearly exploitative. Even in such a poor area three dollars doesn´t buy much, it´s not a proper wage. But many businesses cannot afford to pay any more than that and still make a profit. Ironically Inca Wasi only paid it´s staff ten soles a day also. Charity doesn´t extend to the local adult staff, only to the children.

We began to encounter out first problems quite early in the process. The ploughing of the fields was delayed as we tried to find someone able to do it. The local University has a large agricultural department and we were able to hire a tractor, plough and someone to drive it for us. But the guy wasn´t available to work until the following week but he was working on another job. Then unexpected bad weather forced us to wait another few days and we found ourselves behind schedule. But this was typical of the type of frustating problems and delays which we encountered during the project. The rickety old tractor (which must have been about fifty years old I would say) eventually came along and finished the job of ploughing the fields (much to our relief).

Next we bought a large amount of industrial chemical fertilizer. Roger, myself, Mallaneo and a farmhand spread the fertilizer on the fields with our bear hands, stupidly without wearing any gloves. It was hard work on a very hot day though. I got badly sunburnt on my face and neck after I left my sombrero at home.

I think that my oversized sombrero made me one of Cajamarca´s most eccentric residents at that time. The only other people who wore sombreros were Quechua speaking peasants (campesinos) who travelled into town to sell their produce at the markets. The women in particular look wonderful in their distictive brightly coloured clothing (luminous pink, yellow or turqoise skirts with white blouses and green or brown skirts and a sombrero on top). But people who lived in the city all wore western style clothing most people wore jeans, lawyers and businessmen wore suits etc. They thought that sombreros were only for poor uneducated peasants who worked in the fields all day. I was the only person to combine the campesino style and the western style. In truth I probably looked ridiculous. But the sombrero did a good job of protecting me from the harsh sun, and got me a lot of attention which I enjoyed a lot. èrhaps my look also caused people to let their guard down around me and to dismiss me as a harmless eccentric instead of questioning me more deeply on what I was doing in Cajamarca and why I spent so much time out in Huacariz with Roger. My appearance allowed me to ´get away with it´on occasions.

I left CPeru very shortly afterwards to live in a hotel, Heather and Megan also left to go travelling. I never saw Heather again (a pity because I liked her), but Megan later returned to Cajamarca to be with her boyfriend Yuri. Yuri is a talented folk musician and a native of the narby town of Celendin. He frequently brought his guitar along to volunteer parties to provide entertainment. Songs which people could sing along to, accompanied by Marco striking out a rythym on a wooden box.

As for Carla and her son, I´ve never seen or heard from them since. My suspicion is that none of us know the full story about her and why she acted the way she did. When I knew her before she was so kind to the kids, but at CPeru she didn´t help the kids in any way. My own pet theory is that she was encouraged to steal the money and destroy the organisation by Bruce Thornton the founder of Bruce Peru and that she went back to work for him again afterwards. Bruce was paranoid and nefarious and I wouldn´t put it past the man to do something so nasty. And if it were true that Carla did it on Bruce´s orders, it wouls still be one of the least far fetched stories told here.

The Tuesday after Carla was sacked a new volunteer coordinator from Ireland called Paul arrived. Paul arrived too late to save CPeru, but he went on to play a pivotal role in the formation of a new charity in it´s place, now called Inca Wasi. He is also involved in many of the sub-plots of this story. Paul is a tall, slim ginger-haired and energetic lad from Dublin. He´s a kind, good natured and exceedingly patient man which is a very necessary atribute to live in Peru. However he also a bit of a dreamer I think and although he had many successful ideas at Inca Wasi he also had a few too many pie-in-the-sky ideas which had little chance of ever succeeding.

While I was still at Inca Wasi, and feeling pretty miserable about the situation, I decided to get drunk on my own one Thursday evening. I knew that on Thursday evenings people often gathered in the main square to drink, dance, play guitar and sing together. I sat on a concrete bench in the plaza until the small hours drinking a bottle of pre-mixed vodka and lemon. Disgusting stuff but it´s a chap way to get drunk. I walked back to the centre to go to bed but I couldn´t get in with my key beause the bolt in the lock was too stiff. Stupidly, instead of knocking on the door to get let in I decided to take a drunken walk to see the city at night. It ws about 2am or 3am and I found the streets deserted until I encountered a group of transvestite prostitutes hanging around on a street corner. As I turned the corner on the opposite side one of them approached me and offered sex. I said no and turned to walk away but he folloed me and then grabbed me in an embrace. I was so drunk I thought he was just a woman with a husky voice. He had long curly hair, make-up, breasts and dressed like a woman, I suppose the adam´s apple should have given it away sooner though. But I had no idea what was going on. Eventually he turned and walked away, but then in a hearbeat my survival instinct kicked in. I realised he had taken my wallet with all my cards in, everything except my passport. As he walked away I followed him and managed to take my wallet back but he grabbed me in a strangle hold and choked me. I tried to shout out for help but I couldn´t draw breath. His friends toook my wallet off me again. They ripped it open took the cash out (only about 8 dollars) and tore the watch off my wrist. But then they laughed, said thank-you and walked off. I had a lucky escape I suppose. There was nobody else around, they could have kidknapped me and forced me to withdraw money from an ATM with my bank card for example. I was really stupid to be walking around the streets on my own late at night carrying all my cards and cash on me. But I learned to be more careful in future.

I was a bit shaken up but unhurt. I walked back to Inca Wasi and luckily Heather was up to let me in. I recounted the story to her and then went to bed, still a little bit in shock. Over the proceeding few months I saw the transvestite on the street several times (although always in daylight hours. I was also robbed again twice and assaulted a further time into the bargain during my time in Cajamarca. All this despite my learning a harsh lesson at the hands of the transvestites. I tryed to stay away from trouble but sometimes it just found me.


To Paul´s great credit things began to improve at the centre almost from the moment he arrived. I felt that he took charge of the situation very early on and that the others (Marge, Susanne, Roger and Marco) all followed his lead. I think that if it wasn´t for his enthusiasm and leadership the centre would have shut down permanently. I also believe that Paul deserves the majority of the credit for forming the new charity which emerged out of the charred ruins of CPeru. One of Paul´s first tasks was to meet with an official from the ministry of labour, but that was already a lost cause and CPeru were forced to pay Carla a large compensation fee for employing her then sacking her without a proper contract of employment in place. Later that day the volunteers plus Marco and Roger had a highly-charged meeting where they decided to set up a new charity in place of CPeru. Paul, Marge, Susanne, Roger and Marco would be the trustees of the new charity and they decided to call it IncaWasi.

I was fed-up and disillusioned with the whole thing and I decided that I wanted no part of it. Also I wanted to concentrate on our Alfalfa. I counselled Roger against becaoming too involved with IncaWasi. He promised me he wouldn´t and to be fair he kept his word on that. Despite the ups and downs IncaWasi has become a well established charity and very successful at helping some of the poor people in the barrio. Paul, Roger and all the others did a fine job and made something beautiful out of a very ugly situation.