Книга - Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

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


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.







Little Princes

One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal

Conor Grennan







Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

© Conor Grennan 2010

Conor Grennan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007354160

Ebook Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007354191

Version: 2018-06-14


For Lizzie


Contents

Cover (#ua9f23ca7-7222-5fbd-b759-40c1d1c5c490)

Title Page (#ucf8b23ce-aae2-5d4c-b22e-177ad28ffc98)

Copyright



A Note on the Crisis in Nepal

Prologue



Part I: THE LITTLE PRINCES

Chapter One



Part II: AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK

Chapter Two



Part III: SEVEN NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK

Chapter Three

Chapter Four



Part IV: INTO THE MOUNTAINS

Chapter Five



Part V: LIZ

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Photographic Insert



Afterword

Acknowledgments

About Next Generation Nepal



About the Publisher


A Note on the Crisis in Nepal

THE DECADE-LONG CIVIL WAR in Nepal (1996–2006) claimed more than thirteen thousand lives. The devastating economic consequences destroyed hundreds of thousands more lives in one of the poorest countries in the world.

In the remote regions of the country, the Maoist rebels, who had taken up arms against the king, used intimidation and murder to control villages. They abducted children, forcing them to join the rebel army in the fight against the royal government.

Child traffickers, preying on villagers’ fears of Maoist abductions, deceived families by promising to take their children to the safety of the Kathmandu Valley, one of the few regions left in Nepal that was still free from Maoist control. For this “service,” they collected vast sums from impoverished families. The traffickers then abandoned the children in Kathmandu, hundreds of miles from their mountain villages. These children, who could be as young as three years old, effectively became orphans.

There are tens of thousands of children still missing in Nepal.


Prologue

December 20, 2006

IT WAS WELL AFTER nightfall when I realized we had gone the wrong way. The village I had been looking for was somewhere up the mountain. In my condition, it would be several hours’ walk up a rocky trail, if we could even find the trail in the pitch-dark. My two porters and I had been walking for thirteen hours straight. Winter at night in the mountains of northwestern Nepal is bitterly cold, and we had no shelter. Two of our three flashlights had burned out. Worse, we were deep in a Maoist rebel stronghold, not far from where a colleague had been kidnapped almost exactly one year before. I would have shared this fact with my porters, but we were unable to communicate; I spoke only a few words of the local dialect.

Exhausted, I slumped down beside them. I zipped up my jacket and knotted my arms tightly around my chest to keep out the cold. Six days had passed since I split from my team. I had sent them home, back to their villages, promising them that I would be okay. My guide, Rinjin, tried to stay with me. Just to make sure the helicopter comes, he had said. I assured him everything would be fine and pushed him to leave with the others. The trek back to their villages would take the men several days, and they had been away from their families for almost three weeks. Rinjin had taken a last look at the empty sky, shaken his head at my stubbornness, and clasped my hand in farewell. Then he hurried to catch up with the others already descending the trail.

I reached into my bag, looking for food. I pushed aside the weather-beaten folder, crammed with my handwritten notes and photos of young children, children who had been taken from these mountains years before. The notes had been my only clues to finding their families in remote villages accessible only by foot.

Behind a crumpled, rain-stained map, my hand touched two tangerines—the last of our food. I passed them to the two porters.

I wondered how things would have been different if I hadn’t gotten hurt. Or if I hadn’t split from my team, or if I hadn’t decided to wait on that mountain for a helicopter that never came. It didn’t matter now. What did matter was figuring out how we would get through the night.


Part I

THE LITTLE PRINCES

November 2004—January 2005





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