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37 pages 1 hour read

Conor Grennan

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

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011

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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3 Summary: “Seven Needles in a Haystack: April 2006-November 2006”

Grennan returns to his mother’s home in New Jersey after his second volunteering stint at the Little Princes. After working in Prague, volunteering in Nepal, and traveling the world in between, “For the first time in ten years, I had come home to stay, to find a job, to settle down” (98). The author’s friends celebrate his homecoming by offering dinner, drinks, and potential matches with eligible women. While still living at his mother’s house in New Jersey, Grennan begins to search for jobs in New York City. Although the experience at the orphanage fundamentally changed him, Grennan acknowledges that it appears as just a single line on his resume.

News of Nepal’s worsening civil war is making headlines in the United States, which often distracts Grennan from his job search. Due to severe fighting between the Maoist rebels and King Gyanendra’s royal army, “Nepal had reached a boiling point” (99). After some weeks at home, Grennan receives an upsetting email from Viva Bell, the woman who runs the Umbrella Foundation. Bell informs Grennan that despite her many efforts, her team was unable to retrieve the seven children and bring them to the orphanage. Golkka, the child trafficker, had found the children and trafficked them across Kathmandu in an attempt to hide the evidence of his illegal operation.

Grennan decides to return to Nepal for a third trip to locate the seven lost children. Before this trip, however, he understands that he will need to prepare to scale up his operation. No longer will being a single, American male volunteering at the Little Princes Children’s Home be enough to help these trafficked children. He decides to create a nonprofit organization through which he can garner donations to assist in his plan. Farid agrees to return to Nepal from France and help Grennan in finding the seven children. He names his organization Next Generation Nepal and begins to draw donations from family, friends, and associates abroad. Concurrently, the Maoists and Royal Nepalese Army reach a ceasefire, which ends the civil war.

In September 2006, Grennan returns to Nepal to begin searching for the seven lost children. During his search process, he lives at the Little Princes Children’s Home in Godawari and helps take care of the 18 children. Nepalese friends and co-workers are highly skeptical that Grennan will be able to find the seven children in the madness of Kathmandu, where thousands of children are illegally trafficked.

Gyan, head of the Child Welfare Board, promises to help Grennan locate the children but warns the task may be impossible. Gyan tells Grennan, “There are thousands of children like this. But now we must continue to search for your seven children. We cannot give them up, no?” (119). With Gyan’s aid, Grennan visits several illegal orphanages. He sees many dozens of illegally trafficked children—poor, dirty, starving—but none are the seven he is searching for. It’s clear that Golkka split up the seven kids.

In September 2006, Grennan receives an email from a woman named Liz Flanagan, who is a lawyer living in New York City. Liz relays her prior experience working in an orphanage in Zambia and talks to Grennan about her upcoming trip to volunteer in India. Grennan and Liz strike up a long-distance friendship over email, sharing their experiences abroad and caring for orphaned children. As Grennan volunteers at Little Princes and works to find the seven missing children, Liz’s emails become a source of happiness and hope for him. Liz is a devout Christian. Although Grennan believes in God, he does not necessarily incorporate a Christian belief system into his work in Nepal. However, he appreciates Liz’s faith in God’s plan to find the children. Upon seeing a picture of Liz, he is amazed by her beauty and beautiful blonde hair.

Anne Howe, an American living in Kathmandu, helps Grennan track down one of the children, Amita, the only girl in the group of seven. Amita is sent to live at the Umbrella Foundation in Kathmandu with Viva and Jacky. Three days later, Grennan receives word that a pair of brothers, Navin and Dirgha, have also been located. The boys are starving and Grennan fears that one of them will not make it through the night. The author rushes the two boys to the hospital, where he has to toss a dirty needle off a bed to make room for Dirgha, the sickest of the two. Grennan nurses Dirgha through the next few nights and, amazingly to all, the young boy survives. Out of the woods, Grennan transfers the two boys to the Umbrella Foundation. And in a number of weeks, one more of the seven children appears at the Umbrella Foundation, Kumar.

As he is finding some of the seven lost children, Grennan spends his extra time in Kathmandu looking for a home he can rent for the NGN organization. This home will become a new orphanage to house the seven children, once found, and other trafficked children in need of a home. The home he decides to rent is adjacent to the Umbrella Foundation orphanage, which means he can keep a close connection with Viva and Jacky. Grennan formally moves from the Little Princes Children’s Home to his new orphanage in Kathmandu, which he names Dhaulagiri House after a Himalayan mountain. By the end of 2006, Grennan and his allies have found six of the seven missing children.

Farid also moves from the Little Princes to Dhaulagiri House to help prepare the new orphanage for children while Grennan rents his own apartment within eyeshot of Dhaulagiri House. At the end of Part 3, Farid and Grennan are thrilled to transfer six of the seven lost children from the Umbrella Foundation into their new orphanage, marking a major accomplishment for Grennan and NGN.

Part 3 Analysis

Grennan’s return to America in 2006 represents far more than a physical event. For Grennan, it represents the next chapter of his adult life, during which he plans to build a career and a establish a home in the United States. His homecoming represents something of a reestablishment of his old self—the person he was before traveling to Nepal—who prioritizes a steady nine-to-five career, income, dates with women, and carefree socializing with friends. Grennan becomes fixated on helping the seven children because he feels a personal responsibility for their situation. Guilt resides at the core of his motivations to return to Nepal. The seven children he sets out to help may make up just a tiny percentage of the larger number of lost children, but for Grennan it’s the best and only place to start.

By taking personal responsibility for the seven children’s welfare and vowing to return to Kathmandu to find them, the author fundamentally commits himself to his work in Nepal and its lost children. In other words, Grennan is at least temporarily giving up a life and career in the United States; the children of Nepal, including the lost seven, have become his entire world and personal future. But this commitment to Nepal’s orphans means the death of his life in the United States, a painful realization for him. The life he was beginning to build in New York “was a dream. It was a life where I had friends and money and dates and food I had been craving for the past year” (102). To go back to Nepal to search for the seven children means giving up his future life in the United States near friends and family. Again, Grennan is torn between his two selves: the young, naïve, and ambitious one who lives in America, and the dedicated, responsible one who lives in Nepal.

Across Kathmandu are thousands of impoverished, malnourished children who are separated from their parents and in danger. Grennan comes to see the sad irony in his obsession with finding those seven children when hundreds more just like them stood right before him. Upon seeing one group of trafficked children living in squalor, Grennan realizes, “I was no longer looking for the seven children—they were in front of me” (120). Ultimately, the author comes to understand that it is guilt that is driving his desire to find the seven children above all others because they were taken by Golkka on his watch.

Once Grennan introduces Liz Flannagan in the beginning of Part 4, Liz becomes a central part of the story for the remainder of the book. Although Grennan does not yet spell out his feelings until a later section, it is clear to the reader that Liz has sparked something in Grennan. In the previous pages, the author denies any particular attachment to women beyond meeting them at bars. The detail with which Grennan describes Liz’s emails, her background, and her personality clearly sets her apart from other characters and centers her as his love interest.

Again Grennan’s struggle with his self-worth, ego, and guilt plague his time in Nepal. For instance, once he locates Navin and Dirgha and transports them to the malnutrition ward of the hospital, he feels intense guilt that there’s nothing more he can do to save Dirgha’s life. “Nepal had taught me that children needed very little to survive. But, in this moment, possibly on the verge of the unthinkable happening, I felt woefully, embarrassingly inadequate” (130). While they are no longer being trafficked and are receiving nourishment at the hospital, they are still near death despite Grennan doing everything within his power to help.

Grennan receives a much-needed confidence boost once he establishes the Dhaulagiri House, finds six of the seven missing children, and moves with Farid from Godawari to Kathmandu. Now, with Grennan and Farid’s help, the Little Princes and the lost children (with exception of one) are no longer in danger. It is only after these achievements are set into place that the author starts to develop a stronger sense of his capabilities as a foreigner in Nepal. He relies on that newfound confidence to plan his journey to find the children’s parents in Humla.

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