Helping Orphans in Nepal (page 3 of 4)

Images from this article

Photograph by Marc Asnin/Redux

Connor Grennan hiking in the Shawangunk Mountains on a recent visit to his hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York.

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Grennan's mission would take him from Kathmandu, the capital, across the country, and to remote mountain villages in northernmost Humla.

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Courtesy of Conor Grennan

An entire village gathers to greet Grennan, who used a translator to interview parents about the children they had lost contact with years before.

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Courtesy of Conor Grennan

A Nepalese woman breaks down after Grennan gives her news of her daughter.

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Courtesy of Conor Grennan

An entire village gathers to greet Grennan, who used a translator to interview parents about the children they had lost contact with years before.

>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.

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