Above: Sergio after he received his honorary degree from the National University of Central Peru
Wednesday 7/30/08 Huancayo, Peru
Ten years ago, Sergio, my host here in Huancayo, shed his old life like a snake sheds it skin. After quitting his high-paying job as a bank manager, he left his home country, Italy, and abandoned the mentality that had once consumed him there, one that prized wealth and convenience over all else. He awoke from himself; tired of acting out his life, he chose to take action.
Sergio moved to Peru and founded his own non-profit organization. Years later, he is now managing the two institutions that he himself started—an orphanage and a school for impoverished children.
Sergio jumped. Before knowing exactly where he’d land, he leaped from his comfortable life in Italy in hopes of bringing about a positive change in the world around him. For Sergio, the courage required to make such a leap was not innate; a child showed him how love could fuel his strength and motivation. His adopted daughter, Peruvian-born and afflicted with a terminal illness, died and, in doing so, gave life to Sergio. She inspired him to move to Peru and help other children like her, children for whom life is a fight, children who need help in learning how to hope.
At first, Sergio didn’t know where to start. He made a few reconnaissance trips to Peru over the course of three years just so he could find a place where he could work and live. After countless hours spent traversing the country’s rock-studded dirt roads in buses and vans, Sergio finally settled on a spot in Peru’s selva, an area of dense lowland tropical rainforest. With an area and a population group in mind, he was able to write up a specific mission statement and craft clear goals for his organization. But, as Sergio knew would be the case, having a powerful mission statement wasn’t enough to bring momentum to a budding non-profit. He needed help.
Sergio asked friends and family to donate money to help start his organization. They did. The bank where he used to work even agreed to offer continuing support for his project. It was a large French NGO, however, that finally helped bring Sergio’s dreams of helping Peruvian children to fruition. After seeing how Sergio had managed to raise a bit of money on his own, the NGO agreed to provide the seed money he needed to purchase land and begin construction on his first project in Peru—an orphanage in a poor community in the selva.
As the years passed, as Sergio worked on securing more funding to help his organization grow, different groups of people tried to influence his project. He told me about his relationship with one large Catholic non-profit organization in Peru.
“At first, everything was OK. They wanted to help me with the orphanage. It seemed like they really wanted to help the children. But after a while, though, things changed. We had problems,” Sergio said. His long legs pulled his tall lanky frame down the sidewalk at a slow pace. With his hands in his pockets, with slow turns of his head, he surveyed the road up ahead, the chaos of the market stirring around in a thin cloud of dust. He looked like a tourist strolling around the city, taking in the sights, but he had no camera; his faded clothes would hang more naturally on a rusty hook in a cramped market stall than on a shiny metal rack in a mall clothing store.
“What kind of problems?” I asked.
“Oh, lots of problems. The main thing was they didn’t want to offer their help for free—they wanted me to make the children Catholic, to force them to become Catholic. I told them I didn’t want to do this, that it wasn’t fair to the children. And eventually, I stopped working with the Catholic organization because of how they pressured me to convert the children. I don’t work with any religious organizations anymore. Yes. It’s too stressful,” Sergio said, looking down at his feet with resignation weighing heavy in his words.
We walked through the market and neared our house. When we stopped at a red light, a stream of old taxi cab station wagons fired past us in a white blur. We waited a few steps back on the sidewalk just in case one of them happened to jump the curb on a sharp turn.
“Sergio, do you think you’ll live here in Huancayo and manage the orphanage and school for the rest of your life?” I asked. It all seemed so exhausting to me—the 15 hour bus trips to the selva to visit the orphanage, the trips back to France to make presentations to the NGO about progress he was making in Peru, the 25 minute walk to school past all the hanging chickens with bloody necks in the market.
Sergio smiled but resisted letting out a proper laugh.
“Well, I don’t know.“ Pause. “Hmmmm, yes, I don’t know. I think I would like to move near the sea and open up a restaurant someday. Someday. Maybe,” he said, smiling.
