As a girl, Victoria Maldonado spent holidays at her grandparents' farm, far from the crowds and concrete of the Latin American city where she lived. Now 34, Maldonado looks back with some appreciation for those days. "We were always taught that you had to work for what you earned," she says. "I participated in moving the anacondas to the lakes in the dry season."

When she was 17, Maldonado left for the US to continue her education at Cornell University, as her father and two of her four siblings had done before her. After graduating, she moved to Tokyo where she studied Japanese. By the time she reached her late-20s, she was working in finance in New York and received a call from her parents saying, "Why don't you come down here and see what we have," she says. "I realised they had been preparing me the whole time."