Little Princes
Authors: Conor Grennan
Little Princes
One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal
Conor Grennan
Dedication
For Lizzie
T
he decade-long civil war in Nepal (1996–2006) 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 tangerines—the last of our food. I passed them to the two porters.
I wondered how things would have been different if I hadn’t gotten hurt. Or if I hadn’t split from my team, or if I hadn’t decided to wait on that mountain for a helicopter that never came. It didn’t matter now. What did matter was figuring out how we would get through the night.
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 time—exaggerating. 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 I’d met in bars. “Sure, there’s a civil war going on. And yes, it might be dangerous. But I can’t 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 couldn’t 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 country’s fauna. Couldn’t 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 stricken—stricken!—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 decided—rather quickly and rashly—to spend my entire net worth on a trip around the world. I couldn’t 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 hadn’t heard from them before, like “retirement savings” and “your children’s college fund” (I had to look that last one up—it 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 didn’t 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.
I looked out the dirty taxi window. Through the swarm of motorcycles and overcrowded buses, I saw a small park that had been converted into a base for military vehicles. Some children had gotten through the barbed wire fence and were playing soccer. The soldiers merely watched them, hands resting on their weapons. I took a last look at the photo of the lonely koalas, sighed, and put the brochure away. In two and a half months I would be far away from here, preferably on a conflict-free beach.
After a half hour of driving through choking traffic over a pockmarked slab of highway known as the Kathmandu Ring Road, then through a maze of smaller streets, I noticed the scene outside had changed. Moments earlier it had been a chaotic mass of poverty and pollution; this new neighborhood was almost peaceful in comparison. There were very few cars, save the occasional taxi. The shops had changed from selling household necessities like tools and plastic buckets and rice to selling more expensive, tourist-oriented things like carpets, prayer wheels, and mandalas, the beautifully detailed paintings of Buddhist and Hindu origin used by monks as a way of focusing their spiritual attention. Vendors leaned in the window as my taxi edged its way through them, offering carvings of elephants or wooden flutes or apples perched precariously on round trays. Bob Marley blared out of tinny speakers.
The biggest change was that the pedestrians were now overwhelmingly white. They fell into two broad categories: hippies in loose clothing, with beaded, kinky hair, or sunburned climbers in North Face trekking pants and boots heavy enough to kick through cinder blocks. There were no soldiers to be seen. We had arrived in the famed Thamel district.
There are really two Kathmandus: the district of Thamel and the rest. In the general madness of Nepal’s capital, Thamel is a six-block embassy compound for those who want to drink beer and eat pizza and meat that they pretend is beef but is almost certainly yak or water buffalo. Backpackers and climbers set up camp here before touring the local temples or hiking into the mountains for a trek or white-water rafting. It is safe and comfortable, with the only real danger being that the street vendors may well drive you to lunacy. It was like the Nepal that you might find at Epcot Center at Disney World. I finally felt at ease. I would spend my first hours in the Thamel district, and by God I was going to enjoy it.
Orientation for the volunteer program began the next day, held at the office of the nonprofit organization known as CERV Nepal. I sat with the other dozen volunteers, mostly Americans and Canadians, and tried to focus on the presentation. The presenter was speaking in slowly enunciated detail about Nepalese culture and history. The presentation was frightfully boring. I found it impossible to keep my attention focused on the speaker, even when I concentrated and dug my nails into the palms of my hands. By the second hour, I would hear phrases like “Remember, this is Nepal, so whatever you do, try not to—” and then notice a leaf flittering past the window and get distracted again.
That changed about an hour and a half into the presentation when the entire group visibly perked up at the mention of the word
toilet
.
Travel to the developing world and you will quickly learn that toilets in the United States are the exception rather than the rule. I readily admit to my own cultural bias, but to me, toilets in America are the Bentleys of toilets, at the cutting edge of toilet technology and comfort, standing head and shoulders above what appeared to be the relatively primitive toilets of South Asia. Unfortunately, those toilets are often first discovered at terribly inopportune moments, sometimes at a full run after eating something less than sanitary, bursting through a restroom door to discover a contraption that you do not quite recognize. If there is ever a moment for panic, that is the moment.
So when I heard Deepak say “You may have noticed toilets here are different” my ears twitched. Deepak then took a deep breath and said, “Hari will now demonstrate how to use the squat toilet.”
I wondered if I had heard that correctly.
Hari walked to the middle of the circle of suddenly alert volunteers. Jen, a girl from Toronto sitting a few feet away, summed up what everybody must have been thinking with a panicked whisper: “Is he gonna crap in the room?”
Hari reached for his belt. I heard somebody shout “Oh no!” but I couldn’t take my eyes off the nightmare unfolding in front of me.
But wait—he was only miming undoing his belt. He then mimed lowering his trousers, mimed squatting down, mimed whistling for a few seconds, then mimed using an invisible water bucket to clean the areas that shall not be named. He stood up and gave a little “voilà!” flourish, then quickly left the circle and walked past Deepak out the door, his face bright red.
Clearly Deepak outranked Hari.
I wanted to applaud. It was the first truly practical thing we’d learned. For months afterward, I often thought of Hari at those precise moments, and I silently thanked him every time I watched a hapless tourist step into a bathroom and saw their brow furrow as the door closed behind them.
The in-office orientation lasted just one day, and then we piled into the backs of old 4x4s and drove south out of Kathmandu toward the village of Bistachhap, where we would continue our week-long orientation. We would be placed with families, one volunteer per home, to get acclimated to village life in Nepal.
Bistachhap is a tiny village on the floor of a valley surrounded by what I would have called mountains back in the United States, rising about two thousand feet above the village. With the Himalaya in the background, though, they looked like good-sized hills. These hills formed the southern wall of the Kathmandu Valley. The valley floor was covered with rice paddies and terraced mustard fields, blooming in bright yellow. Bistachhap itself was little more than a small collection of about twenty-five homes, mostly mud but some concrete, a dirt path connecting them like the wire on a set of Christmas lights. The houses sat on the north side of the floor of the valley, each one providing a view of the rice paddies on the other side of the path. I was assigned to a concrete yellow house, which looked pretty snazzy sitting next to the mud ones, though inside revealed a simple structure. I had my own bedroom, a simple affair with a single bed on a mattress of straw and a swatch of handmade carpet spread out on the floor. It was clear that somebody else in the house had vacated their room for me.
After dropping my backpack in the room, I went to formally introduce myself to my host mother, proud to be able to use one of the three expressions I had learned in Nepali: “Mero naam Conor ho.” My host mother, in the middle of her workday, was caught off guard by my apparent comprehension of her language. She dropped her water bucket and raised her hands over her head in excitement and launched into a monologue about God knows what. I took a step back and held up my hands, saying “Whoa whoa whoa whoa!” for the entire time she spoke. In Nepali that must mean “Continue! I completely understand you, and I enjoy this conversation!” because damn if she didn’t go on for several minutes, getting more and more excited, until her daughter, a little girl of perhaps six or seven, took my hand and dragged me away.
The daughter, whose name I would learn was Susmita, walked me out to the front porch and plopped down on a straw mat, inviting me to do the same. She pointed to the mat and said a word in Nepali, waiting for me to repeat it. I did so. Then she repeated this with the house, the door, the garden, and anything else she could think of. I repeated each word and let her correct me until I had nailed it. Her face lit up. She was going to teach me Nepali, and I was going to learn. She disappeared, returning a few moments later with her homework, wherein she drew a single character in Sanskrit over and over, as one might practice a capital
B,
pointing to each one for my benefit until her mother fetched her to help with dinner preparation.
Unsure of what to do, as I could see no other volunteers anywhere, I took a walk through the village. I called out “Namaste!” to every villager I passed, and usually received a “Namaste” in return, though they seemed oddly reluctant.
This turned out to be, not surprisingly, my own fault. I had thought “Namaste” was like “Hey there!” or “What’s up?” but I would later learn that it was a far more formal greeting than this. Yoga enthusiasts will recognize it and may even know the translation, which is along the lines of “I salute the God within you.” Heavy stuff. Yet I yelled it to everybody, the same way you might yell “Dude!” or “My man!” to your buddies. I accompanied it with a big friendly wave. I said it to children. I said it to people I’d just seen four minutes earlier. I saw a stray dog and bent down to give him a scratch behind the ears and saluted the God within him. I saluted the God within a mother carrying a baby, then saluted the God within the baby.
Down the path, I saw my host mother outside looking around for me. She recognized me from a distance and waved me in. I was late for dinner. I followed her into what I supposed was the kitchen. There was a mud floor, an open fire in the corner, and two boys of perhaps nine years old sitting Indian style on the floor next to Susmita, who sat next to their father. The boys patted the ground next to them happily, pleased that I was joining them. The mother, meanwhile, had squatted next to the large pot. She picked up a metal plate and dumped what looked like several pounds of rice onto it for the family, and placed it in front of me. I was about to take some and pass it along, when I saw her preparing an even bigger mountain of rice and placing it in front of the father.
After placing similar plates in front of her children, she took a ladle out of the other pot and poured steaming hot lentil soup over the rice on our plates:
daal bhat,
literally, “lentils with rice.” Daal bhat is eaten by about 90 percent of Nepalese people, twice a day. The mother added some curried vegetables to my plate, at the same time shooing away a stray chicken.
When everyone was served, the mother put her hand to her mouth, indicating that I should eat. I nodded in thanks, then looked around for some kind of utensil. There was no utensil. I watched the rest of the family stick their hands into the hot goo, mash it up, and begin shoveling it into their mouths.