PERU:Cusco is a colourful, friendly place that welcomes hordes of tourists every year. But life there is tough, especially for children, of whom between 10,000 and 18,000 are classified as being "at risk". Elim, a children's refuge set up by a local social worker, offers a glimmer of hope, writes DEIRDRE MCQUILLAN.
FIRST-TIME VISITORS, including solo travellers, are never alone for long in Cusco, the wondrous Inca capital high up in the Peruvian Andes. In its celebrated central square, the Plaza de Armas, colourful street kids as young as five will quickly whirl around you, offering finger puppets, shoe shines, paintings, sweets. Little girls in technicolour skirts and hats cradling baby lambs will smile alluringly for photographs and a few soles (the local currency) into the awaiting palm. Older boys insist on shining shoes, even suede runners, keen to practise English or relieve you of yet more soles or dollars.
It’s all great fun and very touristy, but there is another side to this place – the poverty and unemployment which is endemic in this city of nearly one million people. Travel to the less salubrious areas such as Santiago and you’ll find kids sleeping in makeshift cardboard boxes or huddled together sniffing glue. According to local police estimates, there are between 10,000 to 18,000 children at risk in the city and posters warning against human trafficking and sexual tourism are testimony to government efforts being made to stop this practice.
When Madeleine McCann disappeared in Portugal, the whole world was put on alert; in the local police station in Cusco there are posters with mugshots of some 11 children who have gone missing in recent weeks and months. These are reported cases, stresses Cesar Guzman, a senior official of the Commisaria de Mujeres which deals with domestic violence. Many go unreported.
“Owners of gold mines come here to recruit workers from ages 12-17 – the girls end up in the bars. Some die there, some go missing – and boys return here with a lot of problems. Aids, for example,” he says.
Inside the building, a dark room with a TV and about a dozen bunk beds with torn mattresses is filled with juveniles (including somebody’s toddler) being held in custody for crimes such as pickpocketing, robbery or prostitution.
“We have no facilities to feed them here,” Guzman explains. “This place is not designed for keeping people in custody. Some institutions send lunch, but that doesn’t always work. We are dependent on donations and don’t get enough government funding.”
Under a new female chief, the police themselves raised money for the new bathroom. “But we are trying to make a safe city for tourists as Cusco depends on tourism,” he sighs.
Many charities operate in and around the city, mostly set up by concerned foreigners, though Guzman argues that only a handful really work adequately.
People praise the work of Los Ninos, set up by Dutch backpackers, the Hope foundation and a British woman’s project called Kiya. In the city’s premier hotel, Hotel Monasterio, an extra dollar is added to meals to support three charities overseen by the local archbishop.
Elim was set up by a local social worker, Nilda Escobar, eight years ago and now houses 28 boys and girls in separate buildings.
“Their fathers are in jail, or their mothers are alcoholics or starting a new family. There is a common history of sexual abuse by fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers. When the children suffer abuse they prefer to sleep on the streets. Most are from the highlands and some take the decision to live in the streets at around eight or nine, but some as young as five,” she explains. “I created this place to give the children a sense of home and family. We look out for them and they understand that there is safety here.”
Other problems include sexual exploitation by paedophilic gringos (foreigners) who “offer friendship, take them to restaurants, buy them new clothes. It’s a seduction,” says Jeremy Escobar, who runs the home with his mother.
“I can work in tourism and have worked in tourism, but my passion is to make a difference to these boys’ lives. My mother made a lot of sacrifices in her life to sustain me,” he says. Nilda’s experience of becoming a mother at 15, raising a child alone and seeing kids sleeping rough on the streets in her own city, made her determined to do something about it.
I met Nilda, a woman with long brown hair, glasses and a patient, motherly air, at the refuge, where the boys gathered around her quietly as she read them a story before lunch, a story about the importance of education and betterment in life. One exuberant little eight-year-old with a big smile, listening attentively, had robbed a bank at the age of six. He got in through the roof, but only came away with a DVD player. From the Amazon jungle and abandoned by his mother, he was sent to Elim by a judge. He is now thriving. I watched him later in the yard, in his oversized flip-flops, utterly determined to master rollerblades.
Another lad, nine years old and more subdued, had a terrible history. One of five children neglected by alcoholic parents, he started sleeping rough in the streets. A security guard sexually abused him, then tied him in a sack and threw him into the river in Cusco. A local saw the sack moving and alerted help; the guard was later jailed. According to Nilda, though the boy is now safe, he has no interest in going to school, which is still a problem.
The eldest boy, David, who came to them aged 12 and is now 17, is their success story. Abandoned by his mother in a doorway at eight months, he was later returned to his father, an abusive and violent military man. An old couple living nearby heard the neglected child crying of hunger and offered to take care of him. David’s problems continued when he got cancer and was moved to hospital. When he returned home, his father started to beat him again, so eventually, at the age of 11 he left home and started working with gangs, robbing, sleeping rough and drinking.
Since coming to Elim, David has continued his education and is now a university student with bright prospects, a role model clearly adored by the smaller kids. He is also reconciled with his father, whom he visits every week.
“This place means family, patience, love to me. And now I want to try and help others in the same situation I was in, and worse,” he says with feeling. His current protégée, “the bank robber”, is clearly thriving under his tutelage and, says David proudly, “will now be a responsible adult”.
The home is a rudimentary corrugated roof building centred round a cement courtyard and sandpit with basic facilities such as a dormitory, a simple kitchen, computer and games room and a refectory-cum-meeting room. In the distance there are spectacular views of the surrounding hillsides. I watched the kids do their washing, hang up their clothes and tidy away after lunch.
They are given a sense of responsibility. “Here they have family, they have protection,” says Jeremy. “Boys that grow up without adults feel they are invincible, they think they have the power to do anything. To be an adult is to take responsibility. If we can change this boy, we change the whole family and the family of the future.”
It costs about €4,000 (€2,900) a month to run Elim, which employs about eight people. The money is raised from private donors in Europe and the US, many of them evangelical Christian organisations.
Like many other local charities, Elim depends on volunteers who come to help, mostly in the summer months, playing with the children or helping them learn English. One Canadian volunteer is a dentist who deals with the children’s dental problems.
I met an American called Tim Abbott from Virginia, who has been taking groups of volunteers of up to 40 people, including doctors, to Africa, Romania and Central America for a fortnight each year. Adults and high-school student volunteers sign up and raise their own money – it costs about €1,500 to €2,000 to participate.
“I went to Mexico with my school when I was 16 and it changed my life,” he tells me. “I realised how much I had and if you have a lot, you must give a lot.”
He told me he had helped to set up an orphanage in the jungle for children sexually abused by foreigners. It is in Iquitos, a city only accessible by air and well known for eco-tours. Next summer he will bring volunteers to Cusco.
“People like him help sustain our lives and work here,” Jeremy says, referring to Tim Abbott. “But what’s important is that children can grow and strengthen here and don’t have to work to exist. Though some don’t want to change or can’t change, we always start working again with them, the big ones teaching the younger ones. They learn here what a family is and their wish is that their original family could change to be like the family they have here.”
Deirdre McQuillan and Fionn McCann acknowledge the assistance of the Simon Cumbers Fund. For details of how to get involved with Elim, see www.english.elim-cusco.com.