Helping Orphans in Nepal

Starting an orphanage was the easy part. Trekking into the Himalayas to find the families of 24 "lost children" would take everything he had.

Conor Grennan crept along a cliff wall, the yellow beam from his headlamp the only light piercing the black Himalayan night. He could hear the icy rush of the river far below him and knew that one misstep could send him plunging off the narrow path. His knee throbbed with pain from weeks of trekking, but he pressed on.

In the remote mountain villages of Nepal, even natives avoid walking at night. They had warned the 32-year-old American that it was far too treacherous. But Grennan offered two porters double pay and insisted he had nochoice. This wasn't an adventure. It was a mission.

Inside Grennan's backpack was a folder with the photographs of 24 children he had grown to love after volunteering at an orphanage near Kathmandu, the capital city. During years of civil war, traffickers had taken these children and thousands of others from remote villages near the Tibetan border. While the children's parents thought they had paid for their sons to be saved from conscription into the growing rebel army, they'd unknowingly signed their children up for a life of hard labor, or worse, in the nation's capital. Their plight had moved Grennan to try something no one had yet attempted: to reunite the children with their parents.

Which was how he'd come to spend three weeks hiking from village to village across Humla, just ahead of the winter snow. Once the snow began falling, the sole airstrip in the region would close, and Grennan would be stranded in these unforgiving mountains for months, dependent on the charity of desperately poor people. The hike to the airstrip normally took experienced trekkers five days. He had just two days to get there.

Hungry and hurting, he pushed on through the darkness. "We're not stopping," he snapped at the porters when they motioned to rest. He could hear the men whispering behind him. They made him nervous. Suddenly he realized the black night had gone terrifyingly silent. Had the porters bolted? Panic rose in his throat. I'll be lost here, he thought. If they rob me and leave me for dead, no one will ever know.

Nepal was supposed to be a lark, the first stop on an around-the-world trip Grennan had dreamed of for years. The son of an Irish poet and an American professor, he had grown up in Poughkeepsie, New York, and graduated from the University of Virginia with a political science degree. After nearly a decade working for international nonprofits such as the EastWest Institute, a think tank in Prague, he was eager to trade in his briefcase for a backpack. Doing some volunteer work along the way, he thought, would enrich his travels, and a French-run orphanage just south of Kathmandu had welcomed his offer of help. "I figured I could do some good, then go off and have my fun," he says with a self-deprecating laugh. That was before he met the young residents of Little Princes Children's Home.

By the time Grennan arrived, in November 2004, civil war had been raging in Nepal for eight years. The sad histories of the Little Princes wards represented just a fraction of the suffering of an estimated 30,000 "lost children" of Nepal. After assuring parents that their money would be used to pay for school in Kathmandu, traffickers had dumped the children on the streets of the capital to fend for themselves, forced them into unpaid work, or sold them into slavery. Some of the girls were smuggled across the border to be sold as sex slaves in India. The 18 children who swarmed Grennan his first morning and greeted him as "Conor brother" were among the luckier ones-their traffickers had agreed to relinquish them to the orphanage.

The guy who had "never really been around kids much before" was soon happily devoting his waking hours to the youngsters, who loved to shout his name and pile on top of him in a giggling scrimmage. He shared their twice-daily meals of dal bhat (lentils over rice) and watched them lick their metal plates clean. When there was a bit of chicken as a special treat, the kids devoured the bones as well. Grennan had never imagined such hunger.

Over time, he came to cherish Mamita, the five-year-old girl who never smiled, and Dharma, the ten-year-old boy genius who served as translator. There was also Hirazen, who cheated gleefully at cards, and Ganesh, the oldest, whose calm leadership at age 11 earned him the fond nickname "the Boss."

Grennan often told the wide-eyed children about the world beyond their mountain valley, describing submarines and airplanes and how men had walked on the moon. "I think to this day they don't believe me," he says. When they wondered what an ocean was, the poet's son took them to the rooftop terrace and pointed to the horizon.

"You mean water as far as that house?" they asked.

"No, farther," he told them. "Water as far as you can see—from here to the mountains and beyond—and way, way deeper than the hills are high."

After a few months, Grennan was ready to continue his world tour. He promised the kids he would return in a year. "Don't tell them that," the other adults chided. Volunteers always said this, and the kids never saw them again.

"I'll be back," Grennan insisted.

True to his word, after circling the globe, Grennan returned to Little Princes in January 2006, planning to stay indefinitely. His own savings, plus modest donations from family and friends, supported him. One of the poorest countries in the world, Nepal has an average annual income per person of only $290. "My backpack cost almost that much," Grennan says, shaking his head.

While life at Little Princes, in the Kathmandu Valley, was easier than in the war-ravaged and drought-stricken rural villages, no one had indoor heating. It didn't snow down in the valley, but temperatures frequently dropped to freezing, and the wind coming off the towering mountains could be brutal. The children bundled into layers of clothing and huddled together in bed. Grennan shivered inside his sleeping bag. The kids wore wool hats around the clock.

One day, Grennan caught sight of tiny Mamita, still silent months after arriving at Little Princes. Her dark eyes gazed at him somberly. On a whim, he snatched the conical top of her wool cap and pushed down, making sounds like a plunger. To his surprise, the little girl burst into laughter and took off running, looking merrily over her shoulder until Conor brother gave chase.

To Catch A Trafficker
As the war dragged on, Little Princes reached its capacity. Still, when Grennan and the other volunteers heard that seven kids were being held by a notorious trafficker in a ramshackle hut on one of Kathmandu's main roads, they went to investigate.

Inside, the room was small, windowless, and dark. Newspapers had been stuffed into cracks in the wall to keep out the cold. The children sat silently on the floor, too weak even to play; they were dirty, barefoot, and malnourished. In the weeks to come, Grennan or one of the other volunteers from Little Princes made the hour-long, two-bus trip to the hut a couple of times a week to bring rice. The children, says Grennan, "never said a word."

The staff of Little Princes tried to persuade the trafficker to give up the children, but he refused. Hired out as hotel workers and the like, the children could bring him money for years. When Grennan and his coworkers asked child-welfare authorities to intervene, they were told that because the trafficker had produced (albeit possibly forged) guardianship papers, all the authorities could do was build a neglect case against him. And that would take time.

But time ran out. From their bases in the mountains, Maoist rebels overtook the capital in April 2006, and Grennan and other Westerners were forced to flee. When he returned to Nepal from the United States five months later, everyone at Little Princes was safe. But the seven children held by the trafficker had vanished during the turmoil, just as Grennan had feared they would. He felt somehow responsible. "I knew I had to find them," he says.

Piecing together what he could from different sources in the trafficking network, Grennan learned that the children had been separated. But he had no idea whether they were living in the streets, had been sold into slavery, or were being warehoused somewhere else. He badgered child-welfare officials, and a sympathetic caseworker alerted him whenever there was a new lead to follow.

Together they found the only girl in the group in a nearby village, hollow-eyed and bedraggled, carrying heavy jars of water up a dirt lane. Then Grennan found a six-year-old boy who had been spending 12 hours a day washing dishes at a hotel. Two other boys were found near death in the streets and spent days recovering in the hospital malnutrition ward, where Grennan kept a bedside vigil, dripping water from his fingers into the mouth of one boy. It took three months for him to round up all seven.

Into the Mountains
By the time fighting had subsided in the mountains, Little Princes and other orphanages were full to bursting. Grennan and a young French colleague from Little Princes, Farid Ait-Mansour, realized there was only one option if they wanted to help the dozens of children who still needed a place to go: They would open their own children's home. But they would do more than provide a safe haven for the seven children they had rescued. The young men wanted to go above and beyond—to the mountains—and start reuniting children with their families.

And so later that month, packing his trekking gear and a file with the names and photos of 24 children living at Little Princes, Grennan took a stomach-dropping flight on a single-engine plane to the lone dirt airstrip in the far northwestern region of Humla, where the children were born. "Humla is the most remote part of the country, and one of the poorest, which is saying something in Nepal," Grennan says. "There are no roads, and the guerrillas had blown up all the bridges. You had to cross the river on rope pulleys, with people on either side pulling you." Trekking in this region meant "climbing straight up and straight down" jagged peaks and pinning yourself against cliff walls when a herd of sheep or water buffalo came barreling around a bend.

Grennan hired a translator, and two local porters to carry bags of rice and supplies, then set off with nothing but a crude map to guide him to the first village, called Ripa. "I thought I was in good shape," he remembers. But within hours, the tendinitis in his knee flared up, and he began to limp. The four men followed the river for two days before reaching the first cluster of huts. "Everything was built on steep slopes. It was an absolutely strange and incredibly beautiful landscape," Grennan says. "Everybody came out and looked at me." He gave village elders the names of families they were looking for. The first parents to arrive brought a bag of walnuts and honey to give to the stranger who had news of their son.

"I knew the minute I saw them that they were Dharma's parents because they looked exactly like him," Grennan says. Still, he proceeded cautiously. Do you have a son? What's his name? Whom did you send him off with? When did he leave? Only then did Grennan bring out his photo of the ten-year-old boy his parents had given up at five. "They both burst into a million tears."

He offered the letter Dharma had written them, saying he missed them and was studying hard. He watched the weeping mother kiss the photo and press it to her forehead like a sacred object.

Over the next three weeks, the heartrending scene would repeat itself, in village after village, until Grennan was down to the last child. Now 15, the boy had been trafficked at five, and his file said his widowed mother had abandoned him. Grennan hoped to at least find some extended family. Reaching the boy's village, he was stunned to be introduced to the boy's father, who stared in shock at his own death certificate, which the trafficker had faked to prove he was caring for an "orphan."

Many of the families, Grennan discovered, were far too destitute to feed another child and hoped their children could continue to be cared for and educated in Kathmandu. Grennan offered to reimburse any family who wanted to come visit his new children's home, named Dhaulagiri House, after one of the world's seven highest mountains. Suddenly the children were his responsibility alone.

>The Hard Road Out
Grennan filled his digital camera with photos of the Humla families and carefully tucked away letters to their children, then set off on the arduous trek back to the airstrip. He was buoyed by how successful he'd been but worried about the snow clouds over the distant peaks. "Once the snow came, that was it," he says. The tendinitis in his knee had only grown worse, and he was further weakened by a bout of food poisoning.

On one of the first nights, Grennan and his team stopped at a former Maoist meetinghouse. They were asleep on the mud floor when they were startled by the sound of loud voices. His Nepalese guides quickly identified their owners as Maoist soldiers. Thinking quickly, Grennan grabbed all the flashlights his group had. "We held one in each hand and spread our arms apart," he recalls, giving the illusion that the hut was inhabited by six people instead of three. The soldiers paused, then kept going.

Another chance encounter was more auspicious: A World Food Programme volunteer told Grennan that a helicopter was coming to fetch him and that Grennan was welcome to hitch a ride. He just had to make it to a hilltop plateau the following day. Grennan happily paid his porters and gave away the rest of his rice. He let his thoughts drift to the houseguests who would be waiting to spend Christmas with him back in Kathmandu. One was another American volunteer, Liz Flanagan, who was coming from an orphanage in India to spend a few weeks with the children at Little Princes.

Grennan sat atop the plateau for 12 hours a day for the next four days, but the chopper never appeared. On the fifth day, he finally faced the truth: He could stay all winter or walk out.
His new friend from the WFP urged him to wait, and village elders tried to dissuade him from leaving too. Failing at that, they helped him plan a route and find two porters. He left the rest of his food, save a small bag of oranges, for the stranded aid worker. That first night of hiking, Grennan gave his new porters the name of the village he'd visited earlier in the trip; he figured he could knock on doors there until they found a place to sleep. By 9 p.m., the porters had stopped at a small hut near the river's edge.

"This isn't the village," Grennan protested.

"It is the village," they insisted.

Gazing upward, Grennan saw that the cluster of huts he remembered was terraced much farther up the next mountainside. It would be another two hours of trekking with his aching knee to reach them. Grennan knew that the weary porters would not budge.

"Then we see these flashlights coming down the path," Grennan remembers. A group of European aid workers approached. They had a key to the hut and, better yet, cooking pots and food.

"It was an absolute miracle," Grennan marvels even now, "that they came to that place, on that night, at that moment." After a few hours' sleep, he roused his porters, and they set off again before sunrise. When day did dawn, it was crystal clear-a good omen. By the time the ragtag team made it to the airstrip, they had trekked 27 hours in only two days.

A flight had just arrived from Kathmandu. Grennan spotted a Nepalese family with a boy who reminded him of Dharma. The father saw him staring and approached, beaming. With a start, Grennan realized it was one of the parents he had met with in Ripa three weeks earlier, at the start of this trek. And the boy was Dharma. His parents had already reclaimed him.

"We'll Keep Looking"
Back in Kathmandu, Grennan downloaded over 600 photos to show the children: "When they're happy, they suck in air to make this deep gasping sound." Mesmerized, they studied photos of their families, of new siblings, of favorite streams or clearings where they used to play. They slept with letters their parents had sent back for them.

Grennan and Ait-Mansour got Dhaulagiri House up and running. Grennan estimated that it would cost only $750 a year to feed, shelter, clothe, and educate each child. Friends back in the States were eager to help and sent $5,000 collected from a single fund-raiser.

"People want to send pencils, notebooks, and other stuff, and we let them," Grennan says, "but the truth is, the amount spent on postage alone would buy ten times as much in Nepal. Liz wanted to bring Christmas presents the first time she visited, and I had to tell her: First of all, they're Buddhist, and second, we need to spend money on hygiene, food, and education. We don't want them to be that different from other children."

Grennan and Flanagan's first meeting that Christmas went well; they married last March and are expecting a child in February. In August, the couple returned to the States so that Grennan could attend business school at New York University. One of his goals is finding new funding for his foundation, Next Generation Nepal, which keeps his orphanage running. Grennan plans to return at least once or twice a year after their baby is born. "We'll never bow out," he says. "We adore the kids, and we really love the country."

Since his first trip to the mountains two years ago, Grennan and his partners have reconnected 125 lost children with their families; about 20 have returned to their villages. Twenty-six children live at Dhaulagiri now, and some of their mothers have been hired as housekeepers or helpers. Before leaving Nepal in August, Grennan made another reunion trek into the foothills near Kathmandu, locating more families. Back at the orphanage, he called the children aside one by one to share his news and photos. For the first time, he had bad news, too, for one little girl. "Your parents aren't living in your village anymore," he told her. "I'm not sure I'll be able to find them." He held her as she cried and said the only thing he knew he could promise: "We'll keep on looking."