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."
Howard, whose favourite subject at school is maths, takes me up to the long, airy room where the boys sleep and we perch on his bunk bed while he tells me his story.
"I was living under a bridge," he says. "I'd been on the street for two or three years. There was a volunteer who used to come there and he told us about this place. He brought a few kids, including me, to show us around and I stayed the night. That was the first night I had spent on a bed. I felt very strange, I didn't like it. So we left.
"But back on the street I remembered what it felt like to sleep on a bed. And I thought - I want to go back. When I came the second time I really liked it. I felt what it was like to be clean and to be fed every day. I felt this was my family."
Howard is one of the lucky ones. Most of the children turfed out onto the street - the majority, it is estimated, between the ages of five and nine - do not make it to puberty. Known as "gutter rats" they are kicked or beaten to death, shot by police, run over by cars, repeatedly raped. Many simply starve to death, having been thrown out of an already bulging family by a mother who can no longer afford to feed them. It is a common story in a city that has a population of eight million, about 3.5 million of whom live below the poverty line in its shanty towns. Nobody knows just how many street boys there are in Lima, estimates range from tens of thousands to a shocking 300,000.
At the charity's bakery, which along with a fleet of taxis is one of the Vine Trust's income generating projects, I am introduced to Rico, a bright, attractive looking 19-year-old with dark and watchful eyes.
Clark quietly tells me that when Rico first arrived at Girasoles seven years ago aged just 12, he was in such a bad way that he spent almost a year in hospital being treated for the wounds he had received through sexual abuse. Now however, with the help of the centre, Rico has turned his life around. He works as the bakery's manager - entirely staffed by street boys - shares a flat with several other boys, and earns a salary. Most importantly the bakery generates a profit - which can then be ploughed back into street boy projects.
"From the time I was little I used to have a dream that some day I'd be a baker," Rico says as we share a piece of apple pie fresh from the bakery oven. "I wanted to be able to create and make things. But there were so many times on the streets when things would get bad and my dream would disappear, and I knew I'd never manage. But after I came to the centre, I started to have hope again."
I ask him where he thinks he would be now if he hadn't found the centre. He looks straight into my eyes. "Sería muerto," he says. I would be dead.
ON THE AMAZON, time moves in a line. For those who live on its banks there are no days or weeks or years or birthdays, and no past; only an eternal present, pushing forward as relentlessly as the river itself.
In the shanty town of Belen however, which lies on the edge of the festering, Amazonian city of Iquitos, it is as if time has stood still. Some 40,000 people live in Belen's squalor, where the water of the river rises so high that for six months of the year its inhabitants must use boats to get around its flooded streets, where houses are a few bits of wood covered with tarpaulin and perched on stilts. Cholera is endemic here, and poverty is rife. Last year the Vine Trust opened a medical centre in Belen with funding from Lloyds TSB Scotland, providing healthcare to some of the city's poorest inhabitants.
Iquitos too has a street-boy problem, and about 90km by boat north of the city I visit Puerto Alegria, home to 50 boys rescued from the streets of Belen and another Vine Trust project.
As we arrive the children rush out to meet us, pulling us into tight hugs. It has been raining and my clothes are damp, but one boy - no more than seven- years-old - grabs me round the waist and won't let go. He says in Spanish, "you're soaking wet" - laughs, and holds on to me tighter.
It is a remarkable turnaround for a child who, in order to survive, has learnt to trust no one.
"It's quite a process to get them to trust us," says Clark. "They're fearful. It's only eventually, through many acts of kindness and love, that this breaks down."
Alec Carstairs, Ernst & Young's head of Mergers and Acquisitions (Oil and Gas) is a member of the Trust's board. One of Scotland's most influential businessmen, he decided to join the charity after discovering the body of a dead street boy lying in an alley in Belen during his first trip to Peru.
"There was nobody there for him," he says. "It was incredibly moving, and I just thought, 'this is for real'."
Carstairs rolled up his sleeves and got involved, taking over the running of the finances and bringing his wealth of business experience to the charity.
"It's a standing joke in my organisation that at every business meeting I seem to manage to bring up the subject of Peru," he says drily.
One of the fundamental strategies of the Trust is to get as many people to see the situation for themselves, by sending out work parties from Scotland every year to work on one of the Trust's many projects.
"We want to get as many people into the country to visit it, to see it, to take part in it as we can. It's not about raising money, it's about giving people access and letting them get involved in their own way," says Carstairs.
And then of course there is the charity's medical project. It is five years now since the Vine Trust sent the Amazon Hope, a reconditioned British naval supply ship to Peru, originally to work as a ferry. But when its arrival coincided with a donation of medical supplies from the US, the boat started working as a hospital ship on the Upper Peruvian Amazon.
"Thousands were leaving the banks of the river and ending up in shanty towns like Puerto Belen. They couldn't find work, families would break down, and the kids ended up on the street. We thought if we could support families at the beginning of the process by giving them decent healthcare, maybe we could also help reduce the street boy problem," says McPherson.
Today, the Amazon Hope trundles up and down the river, staffed almost entirely by medical parties from Scotland which go out on two week stints at a time, treating up to 2,000 people every ten days.
Before I leave Peru, I visit the charity's night shelter in Lima. I am warned that it is not like the other centres, that the children who come here still live on the street, that they are filthy and untrusting.
It's in a grim, dangerous part of town, and we arrive just before midnight. There are a couple of grubby mattresses on the floor. A bare lightbulb hangs from the ceiling and in the corner is a huge pot of rice. Every boy who comes in receives a paper plate loaded with food. Before long the shelter starts filling up, boys sloping in off the street, and a few girls too, all of them pregnant and none of them more than 16 years old.
They queue up patiently for their meal, then sit on the dirty floor and chat. I am struck by how normal they are, how much they remind me of the kids I see on Princes Street on a Saturday afternoon, as they laugh and play with a dog that has wandered in.
One boy, who I guess is about 11-years-old, comes over to talk to me. His legs are covered in scars. I ask a Peruvian charity worker to translate what he's saying.
"He is asking you: 'please senora, please take me home with you. Please take me away from this life.'"
I leave Peru feeling, much as I imagine McPherson must do each time he gets on a plane, that there is still much to be done.
A month or so after I return to Scotland I phone McPherson at home in Port Seton. He's busy, flying out to New York the next day to join the Amazon Hope 2 on its way to Iquitos, and chats to me between mouthfuls of his tea. I ask him what his motivation is, why he cares so much about children that live thousands of miles away.
"Well, why not?" he asks. "These days we live in a global village, and the Scots have always been great pioneers. We're not a people who just say charity begins at home and stops there. We are concerned for the dignity of human beings. It's the hallmark of being a Scot."
So is that what drives him?
"Look," he says. "Years ago in Lima I saw a child aged 11, a little street boy called Lucito.
"And he had gonorrhoea in his eye. I watched him bend down to take a drink of water out of a drain at two o'clock in the morning and I looked at that child and thought, that's a human being living like a dog.
"I've often reflected on what if I were like Lucito. Wouldn't it just be wonderful if someone, somewhere in this world would do something that would let me have dignity, and let me have hope. It made me ask what if one, if ten, if 100, if 1,000 children didn't have to live their lives like that.
"Wouldn't it be worth getting up in the morning?"
And with that, he's gone.
• For more information visit www.
vinetrust.org
• The names of the street boys have been changed.
