# Collection Tins, Grenades and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Twenty Years of Trying to Save the World

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/books/collection-tins-grenades-and-rock-n-roll-twenty-years-of-trying-to-save-the-world/
- Published: 2018-01-19T07:22:59+00:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**A fast-paced and lively journey through the life of a charity-sector worker including
the good, the bad, the humanitarian victories and the “can’t fail” failures. The
intentions are always good if the execution isn’t.**

It all starts after university when Williams discovers that he wants to save the
world but get paid for it. The journey includes a bit of sex with a coke-snorting
charity campaigner, getting on the first rungs of a career with Oxfam and then falling
off again, picking coffee during the Contra War in Nicaragua and nearly getting 
blown up for his troubles, working for a book-aid charity run by the aristocracy,
securing a Big Break with Save the Children and the Disasters Emergency Committee–
and quitting in a state of profound disillusionment, after managing the record-breaking
Rwanda Emergency Appeal in 1994.

Later, motivated by the desire for moral resurrection and dwindling savings, after
months in the wilderness, the author secures a position with an international federation
of charities. The job entailed travelling the world at donors’ expense in a partially
successful attempt to improve the welfare of children in numerous countries – with
relaxation provided amongst other things by tango lessons in the Head of the World
Bank in Argentina’s penthouse apartment in Buenos Aires.

‘Gareth Williams’ is not surprisingly a pseudonym.