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

Grennan leaves Nepal and the orphanage in January 2005 to travel around 16 countries in nine months. First, the author meets up with an old friend named Glenn in Bangkok, who wants the pair of them to travel around Southeast Asia on bikes for six weeks. Next, he goes to Cambodia, then on to Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Bali. Finally, he travels to South America and adventures in Peru and Bolivia. In October 2005, he finally returns home to New York.

After a few short weeks at home, however, Grennan longs for Nepal and the Little Princes. He makes a second trip to Nepal in January 2006. Upon returning to the orphanage, the children are surprised and thrilled. Most volunteers, he notes, came for one short visit and never again. Grennan is different. “I knew these eighteen children like I knew my own brothers,” he writes. “Godawari was home” (64). Farid, the French volunteer, is also there continuing to look after the children alongside multiple Nepalese men and women.

During Grennan’s year away from the orphanage, the civil war between the Maoist rebels and the Nepali monarchy has become even more serious and deadly. King Gyanendra refuses to concede power despite the extreme turmoil the majority of Nepalese civilians live under. Notwithstanding multiple ceasefires that seem to indicate a peace agreement is near, the war rages on during Grennan’s 2006 return visit.

One day, an impoverished woman appears at the Little Prince’s gate. She is the mother of Nuraj and Krish, two little boys in the orphanage. Everyone believed the boys’ parents to be dead, so the mother’s appearance comes as a shock. The mother has traveled to Godawari from Humla, the district where the boys were originally born. Years before, a man named Golkka had convinced her and her husband to let him take the boys away to Kathmandu to receive an education and protect them from being conscripted into the Maoist rebel army. Instead of protecting the children, however, Golkka trafficked the children in Kathmandu and never contacted the parents again.

When Nuraj and Krish’s parents never heard word about their sons, their mother traveled hundreds of miles to Kathmandu to find them. Grennan and Farid are shocked by the story. “The Little Princes Children’s Home was not an orphanage at all. These children had parents who were alive,” he writes (78). Grennan realizes that the majority of the children at Little Princes must have similar stories: their parents are indeed alive but are disconnected from their families by hundreds of miles.

Nuraj and Krish’s mother is living at the edge of Kathmandu, so she is not currently able to take the boys home with her. Instead, the mother intends to visit Little Princes often. When the child-trafficker Golkka finds out the mother is living in Kathmandu, he deposits seven other trafficked children from Humla with her and forces her to care for them. Farid and Grennan begin to deliver food and supplies to the mother and the seven orphaned children because they do not have space to take the children into the Little Princes Children’s Home.

Grennan connects with an important Nepalese man named Gyan Gahadur, who is the head of the Child Welfare Board. Gyan helps to place the seven children at another orphanage in Kathmandu called the Umbrella Foundation. The Umbrella Foundation is run by a North Irish woman named Viva Bell and her French partner, Jacky Buk. Staff from the Umbrella Foundation plan to fetch the children as soon as the roads are safe from Maoist attack, which may take weeks.

Understanding that the seven children should soon be safe at the Umbrella Foundation, Grennan returns to America in April 2006. This time, however, he doesn’t promise the Little Princes he will return again. Likely, it will be many years before he can come back because he needed to build his life and career back in America. “I was completely broke,” he admits, “I had to buy food and rent a home” (93).