Helping Orphans in Nepal (page 2 of 4)

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.

• • Inspiring Stories
• Volunteering
• • Cracking Cases

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• James Spring went looking for adventure. What he found: two little girls caught in a fractured family saga.
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• Was It a Murder Conspiracy?
• After four members of his family were brutally murdered, he went from honor student to paranoid outlaw. It took 31 years to catch the killer -- and for Charlie to heal himself.
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• Missing
• When people disappear, Monica Caison gets the call.
•