To South America, with love
EMMA COWING
IT IS A BRIGHT, sunny day in late March and 11 year old David is on his way to school with his friends. They kick a football around as they walk, taking it in turns to be first goalkeeper, then striker. They're a noisy bunch, ribbing each other about their favourite footballers, which team will win the World Cup, and who it was that kept everyone awake with his snoring last night.
It is a life that, until recently, David didn't even dare dream of. For the past four years David has lived on the edge of human existence as a street boy, making his home in an abandoned sewer deep in the bowels of Lima, the rough, violent capital of Peru. He would leave his hiding place only to find something to eat, on countless occasions allowing himself to be sexually abused in return for a plate of food. At times he would become so desperate he would eat the earth itself, or pick at a piece of wall in a last attempt to find some nourishment.
At night, he would inhale cheap glue from a plastic bag in order to, as David puts it, "rub myself out and disappear", before falling asleep in the sewer. From the age of seven, when he was thrown out by a family that could no longer afford to feed him, it was the only life he had known.
For a small Scottish charity, street boys like David are their world. The Vine Trust, which operates from the house of its executive director Willie McPherson in the unlikely surroundings of the East Lothian fishing town of Port Seton, is an ambitious project that works to improve the lives of street children in Peru. The charity has been running since 1985, when it was started as a small, local response to the Ethiopia famine.
Over the years its scope has grown, and in the past decade the Vine Trust has funded several homes for street boys across Peru, developed schools, pioneered educational projects and business ventures, and perhaps most famously sent a boat, the Amazon Hope, to deliver vital medical aid to remote communities on the river for which it was named. In April of this year the Trust sent a second ship, the Amazon Hope 2, to carry out similar work.
At the heart of the Vine Trust is McPherson himself, a former Church of Scotland minister whom the street boys refer to as Papá Noel - Spanish for Santa Claus - because of his jolly appearance and bristly white beard. In 2003 McPherson's friends got together and issued him a challenge. They would fund his salary for the next four years - allowing him to go full time with the trust - if he could raise £1 million for the street boys of Peru. Just over three years on and he has already passed the £1.4 million mark. He has inveigled the services of some of Scotland's top businessmen, persuaded Lloyds TSB Scotland to part with £35,000 to fund a medical centre in the jungle, and got hold of and reconditioned two Scottish former naval supply vessels and dispatched them to the Amazon. With a recently opened centre in the Andes and a further two across the country also operating, this is only the beginning.
I have come to Peru to witness the impact that this remarkable charity is having on so many lives, and just how this small pocket of Scottish goodwill came to be created in the depths of South America.
On my first day in Lima I meet Howard, who lives at the Girasoles Centre, the Vine Trust-funded home to 40 street boys. McPherson came across the site in the 1990s, bought it and turned the ground floor into a car park, which now generates £60,000 a year and funds the centre that sits above it. Howard is 14, possibly 15, no one really knows. Nobody knows his name either, whether he had one even, but one of Girasoles' first tasks when a new boy arrives is to give him an identity of his own.
"We work a lot on self-esteem," says Paul Clark, head of Scripture Union Peru and McPherson's partner in the field. "We ask a boy his opinion. Often they'll just look at you - they don't think their thoughts are worth anything."
