Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal by Conor Grennan

Description

So as not to seem completely self-indulgent to his friends and family, Conor started his year-long trip around the world with a three-month stint volunteering in the Little Princes Orphanage in war-torn Nepal. What began as a cover story changed Conor’s life, and the lives of countless others, forever.The turning point occurred during Conor's second stint as a volunteer with Little Princes. While playing on the roof of the orphanage, Conor was approached by a woman who would turn out to be the mother of two of the wards. Over hours of conversations with her, Conor learned the truth. Many of the little princes were not orphans but children that had been taken from their homes by child traffickers. In addition to losing two of her boys, this woman, while under the control of a human trafficker, was doing her best to keep seven other terrified kids alive. Conor's life changed in those moments, as he decided to commit himself to these unfortunates. After securing spots in an orphanage for all seven and arranging for an excellent local staff to run the Little Princes Orphanage, Conor escaped Nepal, one day before revolution erupted in Kathmandu.After arriving home, Conor received a devastating email reporting that the seven kids had disappeared, snatched once again by the same trafficker. Soon he was back in Kathmandu, riding through the chaotic streets on the back of a local's motorcycle, searching for his kids, seven needles in a corrupt haystack. And that is where Conor's story begins.Conor pledged to not only start a new orphanage for these seven but also to start an entire new programme dedicated to reuniting kids with their lost families in remote villages in the Nepalese hills. He lived under constant fear of retribution from the traffickers.He needed to return to the US by 22 December, both because that was the agreed-upon panic date on which friends would alert authorities if he didn't return, and because it was the date that the woman he'd fallen in love with over email would arrive at his door so they could, at long last, meet in person.Conor's tale is an epic thriller, and a love story, and is best told by Conor himself.

Editorial Review

How Taking Notes and Living without Indoor Plumbing Would Change My Life

When I was living in Nepal, I kept a notebook with me at all times. It was a small Nepali-made notebook—the brand name was Happy Days! or some such thing— and it made me smile every time I looked at it. I took it everywhere I went, and wrote in it often.

The children constantly asked me what I was writing, and I would tell them I was recording our conversations. That was true, but it was more than that. I was also recording everything I found strange in my new home. Like the fact that the kids chewed on chicken bones until they were practically dust, or that one of the boys, Santosh, had a digital watch which he’d borrowed from a friend that, along with displaying the hour, flashed “I Love You!” once per second.

There were times I was caught without my notebook, like in the middle of a soccer game when Dawa’s shot—destined for just inside the invisible right post—was blocked by the broadside of a cow, and I had to try to recall from memory the captivating debate over the role of livestock in team sports, and whether or not the goal should count. (It didn’t.)

Then, when the children would go to bed at 8 p.m., I would bundle up in two or three fleeces, a hat, and woolen gloves I had cut the fingers out of; I’d pull out my notebook and I’d sit down to write my travel blog, copying everything I had put into the notebook over the course of the day into an old, ultra-light Dell I’d bought off eBay for about 200 dollars. It was pretty much useless except as a word processor, but it was the most precious thing I owned. Over the next three years, traveling the globe and living in Nepal, I would end up typing just over half-a-million words on that little workhorse—five times the length of Little Princes.

It turned out that writing everything down in the moment was critical because the more time I spent in Nepal, the more normal these “strange” things became. It became normal to watch my blankets being made from scratch on the ground outside my house, to trade broken flip-flops for potatoes, and to use outhouses on a daily basis without thinking twice about it. (Did you hear that, people? Outhouses!)

The funny thing is, with all that note-taking, I never had any intention of writing a book about my time in Nepal. It honestly never occurred to me that it was a much of a story until someone else mentioned the idea to me.

Once I started writing the book, however, I couldn’t stop. I went back to my old notebooks and I was suddenly in Nepal again, hearing in my mind exactly how Hriteek had laughed, or Nishal had protested, or Raju had squealed as he’d run through the house, bare feet padding against the cold cement floors.

Little Princes, the book, allowed me to revisit that wonderful, difficult, challenging, happy time of my life. I still get back to Nepal, of course, and I still see the children. But they change, they grow up. Writing Little Princes allowed me to visit the children as they were. And also, as the person I was.