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.

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.