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.

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