Conor Grennan - Little Princes: One Mans Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

Little Princes

One Mans Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

Conor Grennan

A portion of the proceeds from this book will go to Next Generation Nepal.

Dedication

For Lizzie

Contents

T he decade-long civil war in Nepal (19962006) claimed more than thirteen thousand lives. The devastating economic consequences destroyed hundreds of thousands more lives in one of the poorest countries in the world.

In the remote regions of the country, the Maoist rebels, who had taken up arms against the king, used intimidation and murder to control villages. They abducted children, forcing them to join the rebel army in the fight against the royal government.

Child traffickers, preying on villagers fears of Maoist abductions, deceived families by promising to take their children to the safety of the Kathmandu Valley, one of the few regions left in Nepal that was still free from Maoist control. For this service, they collected vast sums from impoverished families. The traffickers then abandoned the children in Kathmandu, hundreds of miles from their mountain villages. These children, who could be as young as three years old, effectively became orphans.

There are tens of thousands of children still missing in Nepal.

December 20, 2006

I t was well after nightfall when I realized we had gone the wrong way. The village I had been looking for was somewhere up the mountain. In my condition, it would be several hours walk up a rocky trail, if we could even find the trail in the pitch-dark. My two porters and I had been walking for thirteen hours straight. Winter at night in the mountains of northwestern Nepal is bitterly cold, and we had no shelter. Two of our three flashlights had burned out. Worse, we were deep in a Maoist rebel stronghold, not far from where a colleague had been kidnapped almost exactly one year before. I would have shared this fact with my porters, but we were unable to communicate; I spoke only a few words of the local dialect.

Exhausted, I slumped down beside them. I zipped up my jacket and knotted my arms tightly around my chest to keep out the cold. Six days had passed since I split from my team. I had sent them home, back to their villages, promising them that I would be okay. My guide, Rinjin, tried to stay with me. Just to make sure the helicopter comes, he had said. I assured him everything would be fine and pushed him to leave with the others. The trek back to their villages would take the men several days, and they had been away from their families for almost three weeks. Rinjin had taken a last look at the empty sky, shaken his head at my stubbornness, and clasped my hand in farewell. Then he hurried to catch up with the others already descending the trail.

I reached into my bag, looking for food. I pushed aside the weather-beaten folder, crammed with my handwritten notes and photos of young children, children who had been taken from these mountains years before. The notes had been my only clues to finding their families in remote villages accessible only by foot.

Behind a crumpled, rain-stained map, my hand touched two tangerinesthe last of our food. I passed them to the two porters.

I wondered how things would have been different if I hadnt gotten hurt. Or if I hadnt split from my team, or if I hadnt decided to wait on that mountain for a helicopter that never came. It didnt matter now. What did matter was figuring out how we would get through the night.

THE LITTLE PRINCES

November 2004-January 2005

T he brochures for volunteering in Nepal had said civil war . Being an American, I assumed the writers of the brochure were doing what I did all the timeexaggerating. No organization was going to send volunteers into a conflict zone.

Still, I made sure to point out that particular line to everybody I knew. An orphanage in Nepal, for two months, I would tell women Id met in bars. Sure, theres a civil war going on. And yes, it might be dangerous. But I cant think about that, I would shout over the noise of the bar, trying to appear misty-eyed. I have to think about the children.

Now, as I left the Kathmandu airport in a beat-up old taxi, I couldnt help but notice that the gate was guarded by men in camouflage. They peered in at me as we slowed to pass them, the barrels of their machine guns a few inches from my window. Outside the gate, sandbagged bunkers lined the airport perimeter, where young men in fatigues aimed heavy weapons at passing cars. Government buildings were wrapped in barbed wire. Gas stations were protected by armored vehicles; soldiers inspected each car in the mile-long line for gas.

In the backseat of the taxi, I dug the brochure out of my backpack and quickly flipped to the Nepal section. Civil war, it said again, in the same breezy font used to describe the countrys fauna. Couldnt they have added exclamation points? Maybe put it in huge red letters, and followed it with No lie! or Not your kind of thing! How was I supposed to know they were telling the truth?

As we bounced along the potholed road, I turned longingly to the other opportunities in the volunteering brochure, ones that offered a six-week tour of duty in some Australian coastal paradise, petting baby koalas that were strickenstricken!with loneliness. I never could have gotten away with that. I needed this volunteering stint to sound as challenging as possible to my friends and family back home. In that, at least, I had succeeded: I would be taking care of orphans in one of the poorest countries in the world. It was the perfect way to begin my year-long adventure.

Nepal was merely the first stop in a one-year, solo round-the-world trip. I had spent the previous eight years working for the EastWest Institute, an international public policy think tank, out of their Prague office, and, later, the Brussels office. It had been my first and only job out of college, and I loved it. Eight years later, though, I was bored and desperately needed some kind of radical change.

Luckily, for the first time in my life, I had some real savings. I was raised in a thrifty Irish-American household; living in inexpensive Prague for six years allowed me to save much of my income. Moreover, I was single, had no mortgage or plans to get married or have kids any time in the next several decades. So I decidedrather quickly and rashlyto spend my entire net worth on a trip around the world. I couldnt get much more radical than that. I wasted no time in telling my friends about my plan, confident that it would impress them.

I soon discovered that such a trip, while sounding extremely cool, also sounded unrepentantly self-indulgent. Even my most party-hardened friends, on whom I had counted to support this adventure, hinted that this might not be the wisest life decision. They used words I hadnt heard from them before, like retirement savings and your childrens college fund (I had to look that last one upit turned out to be a real thing). More disapproval was bound to follow.

But there was something about volunteering in a Third World orphanage at the outset of my trip that would squash any potential criticism. Who would dare begrudge me my year of fun after doing something like that? If I caught any flak for my decision to travel, I would have a devastating comeback ready, like: Well frankly Mom, I didnt peg you for somebody who hates orphans, and I would make sure to say the word orphans really loudly so everybody within earshot knew how selfless I was.