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

“I needed this volunteering stint to sound as challenging as possible to my friends and family back home.”

In 2004, Grennan plans to visit Nepal and volunteer at an orphanage for three months. In this quote, the author openly admits that his motives are less about being concerned for the children of Nepal and more about gaining attention for his service. Grennan confesses to these ego-driven feelings to mark the transformation he will undergo in three subsequent years. By 2007, Grennan is a changed person, far more mature and committed to the children of Nepal.

“As it turns out, wondering what you’re supposed to do in an orphanage is like wondering what you’re supposed to do at the running of the bulls in Spain—you work it out pretty quickly.”

Upon arriving at the Little Princes Children’s Home, he feels overwhelmed and unqualified for the task of caring for so many kids. Despite his hesitations, the children immediately ingratiated him into their daily routine, and Grennan learns to go with the flow.

“I felt like a Vanderbilt, presenting gifts to the less fortunate.”

Grennan purchased toy cars for the 18 children at Little Princes, who received the gifts with great excitement. Despite his gifts, however, Grennan finds the children entertain themselves better with the simple toys they are able to create. This quote touches on the author’s ego, which drives much of his interactions during his first trip to Nepal. He assumes his gifts and presence at the orphanage will have savior-like qualities, but the children teach him they can be resourceful and happy on their own.

“They needed me, for three months, to just make sure they were okay, fed, clothed, and bandaged up when need be” 

In this quote, Grennan is reflecting on the fact that his job in Nepal is relatively straightforward: he does not need to change the culture, influence the broader society, or reform how the children comprehend the world. Instead, what they most need from him is stability, the kind of aid that parents provide. This realization sets Grennan apart from many Christian-based missionaries, who often seek to draw foreign children and adults into the religion while providing services.

“Despite myself, I had become a parent to these kids—not because I was qualified, but because I had showed up.” 

Grennan struggles with his identity throughout the memoir. He sees himself as a foreigner who does not speak the language and is unqualified to care for little children or navigate Nepal’s complicated bureaucracy. That doubt, however, begins to fade when he realizes that few other individual people, groups, or government agencies will step in to help the children. He is the right person for the job because he is the one who is there.

“I was returning to a country that afforded me no personal space, that gave no thought to hygiene, that offered no decent food.”

In spite of the many months Grennan spends in Nepal, he never truly grows to like it. Grennan surprises himself when he returns to Nepal for a third trip. He resents the food, the disorganized government, the squat toilets, and the dirty hospitals. What he does love, however, and what draws him back into the country time and again, are the children.

“The children at Little Princes were potential Maoist recruits.”

To increase their forces, the Maoist rebel army began to abduct children from their families and conscript them into their ranks. Many families, like those in the district of Humla, sent their children away to save them from the rebel forces. Even when the children arrived at a relatively safe location, like the Little Princes Children’s Home outside of Kathmandu, Grennan and the staff still feared that Maoists might appear at the door and take the children.

“The Little Princes Children’s Home was not an orphanage at all. These children had parents who were alive.”

Grennan and the staff at Little Princes assumed that all 18 children in the home had lost their parents in the civil war. Having been taken from their homes as young children, most of them had little memory of their parents, villages, or backgrounds. One day, however, a bereaved, impoverished mother arrives at Little Princes looking for her two sons—who are not orphans, after all. Her visit unlocks a deeper story that reveals most of the children at Little Princes are separated from their families due to Golkka, the child trafficker.

“These seven were off the radar, and in this country that meant they were at risk of not surviving.”

Golkka, the child trafficker, abducts seven children that Grennan has attempted to place in a safe children’s home. Separated and dispersed around Kathmandu, the author realizes that finding the children is like finding seven needles in a haystack. If he does not locate them, they could die. In Nepal, in particular, there are few social services, polices forces, or community groups working to protect at-risk children.

“Everything, everywhere, seemed squeaky clean.”

In April 2006, Grennan returns home to the United States. Having spent months in Nepal, he is reminded of the wealth in which Americans live, something he took for granted growing up. With that wealth comes cleaner conditions. In America, unlike Kathmandu, there are sanitary hospitals where staff thoroughly clean beds and instruments; municipal services remove human waste and trash; and cities enforce food-handling standards for restaurants.

“I wasn’t trying to be Mother Teresa.” 

Grennan adopts personal responsibility for Golkka abducting the seven children before they could be transferred to the Umbrella Foundation. He admonishes himself for failing to do what he considers a relatively simple task: saving just seven children. The author feels he is not attempting the great feats of someone like Mother Teresa, yet he has still failed. This sense of failure and responsibility leads Grennan back to Nepal for a third trip, where he works tirelessly to find the seven children and bring them home.

“There was no escaping the fact that seven children were gone because of me, and it was very possible that I would never get them back.”

Grennan takes personal responsibility for the children’s abduction despite their desperate parents, the 10-year civil war, and Golkka’s trafficking. However, Grennan believes they are his responsibility because he was the one who made the plan to send the children to the home where they were taken, again, by the man who took them the first time.

“To me, each donation was a touching display of blind faith that I could be able to accomplish something.”

In 2006, while living for a short time period in the United States, Grennan creates the nonprofit Next Generation Nepal (NGN). The goal of NGN is to reunite trafficked Nepalese children with their families, though Grennan is particularly focused on finding the seven children who Golkka abducted. When his friends, family, and other individuals start to donate to NGN, the author views the dollars as a symbol of support and encouragement. Always unsure if he is the right man for the job, the donations begin to convince Grennan otherwise.

“Liz’s emails were like kindling, sparks of inspiration in a dark week.”

By 2006, Grennan is falling in love with Liz Flanagan, an American lawyer working in New York City. Liz and the author email back and forth daily. Liz supports and encourages Grennan to keep doing the difficult work of finding and reuniting children with their families. Liz is one of the few people in Grennan’s life who believes his mission is not only sound but will also be successful. She represents a beacon of hope.

“Even just a few hours into southern Humla, it was clear how parents here could be cut off from their children in Kathmandu.”

Grennan travels to the district of Humla, a remote area of Nepal near the border with Tibet. All of the children at the Dhaulagiri House and the Little Princes Children’s Home are from Humla, where Grennan suspects their parents are still alive. The author is carrying some anger toward the parents, who he partially blames for the children’s situation since they were foolish enough to send their children away with a child trafficker. However, upon arriving in mountainous landscape of Humla, he also realizes how the region’s remoteness contributes to the reasons these parents have not yet come to Kathmandu in search of their children.

“The similarities between parent and child were remarkable, like stepping into a time machine and seeing the child twenty years in the future.”

When Grennan arrives is the villages in Humla, he can often spot the children’s parents before ever speaking to them. The parents share the same mannerisms and features as their children. This quote reflects just how close Grennan has become with the children at Little Princes and Dhaulagiri House—after spending hours caring for them, he knows them like he would know his own child.

“Children had been taken by traffickers and the door to their village had been slammed shut by the Maoists.”

Child traffickers like Golkka used the civil war as an opportunity to make money from fearful parents eager to send their children out of harm’s way. The Maoists made this trafficking worse by controlling the flow of people around the various districts of Nepal. The Maoists controlled most routes and forms of transportation, making it nearly impossible for the parents to reach Kathmandu or for aid workers to reach Humla.

“It was intimate and overwhelming and I felt, over and over, unqualified to be doing this job. But there was nobody else to do it.”

Grennan struggles with his identity as a white American foreigner, who has lived just a short time in Nepal. He does not speak the local language, does not know the nuances of children trafficking in the country, and cannot apprehend the nation’s complex politics. Despite all the things that make Grennan the wrong person for the job, he realizes that few others will step in to help.

“I was as far away from civilization as I had ever been in my life, and I had no idea how I would get back.”

Grennan is an experienced world traveler and therefore not easily intimidated by journeying in remote regions. Humla, however, is the furthest he has ever been from a telephone, road, or airport. In this mountainous region, if one thing goes wrong—such as his injured knee or the missing helicopter ride—it could spell life or death. The author begins to enter a state of despair, the first and only time he experiences such a feeling in the memoir.

“The kids spoke little English, but as I had learned long ago, language isn’t always necessary when interacting with kids.”

The children at the Little Princes Children’s Home speak some English while the children at the Dhaulagiri House speak almost none. Despite the language gap, Grennan understands the children don’t necessarily need his spoken word but instead need his actions.

“Life was beautifully simple: get up, go hang out with the children, see some touristy stuff in Kathmandu, have a typical Nepalese lunch at some small café, pick up the children from school just around the corner, help them with their homework, spend the evening hanging out with them.”

Grennan is painting a picture of his life in Kathmandu that is, for him, pure bliss. This daily routine is in stark contrast to what his daily life would be like if he had stayed in the United States and not returned to Nepal for a third trip. Now that the civil war in Nepal is over, he and the children can begin to enjoy the normal things in life rather than living in daily fear.

“We lay there, crushed by the children’s body mass in a way that felt so normal in Nepal; and I had the good sense to take note that, in that exact moment, with no money, no clean clothes, no electricity, no good food—just Liz and twenty-six children—I was as happy as I had ever been in my life.”

When Liz visits Nepal a second time, she and Grennan stay at the Dhaulagiri House. The children love to pile on top of the adults. For the author, he realizes that his two greatest loves are now intertwined: Liz and the children. Having finished his harrowing journey through Humla, Grennan recognizes it is the simpler things in life that will make him happy.

“It was three years since I first walked through the gate, when they were so completely unknown to me that I could only tell them apart by the clothes on their backs.”

In this quote, Grennan is reflecting back on his first trip to Nepal in 2004. Upon first meeting the 18 children at the Little Princes Children’s Home, they all looked relatively similar to him. Grennan’s relationships with the Little Princes has deepened to such a degree in the three years since that he finds it almost unbelievable that he ever had to rely on their clothing to tell them apart.