In Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal, Connor Grennan travels Nepal in hopes of finding homes for orphans.
In your memoir, you make fun of your boastful swagger at the launch of your round-the-world trip, until working at the Little Princes Children's Home in Nepal really opened your eyes. At what point did you realize this wasn't all fun and games?
That moment I walked into the orphanage. Before, it was so ethereal in some ways; I didn't expect I would have to do anything. I was concentrating on telling everyone about the adventure. Then I realized what the children's history was—being taken by a trafficker and held in horrible conditions. One night I had to take one of the boys to the hospital, and it suddenly occurred to me that this kid was really sick and that if I wasn't there, what would have happened to him? He would have sustained permanent damage. It was a matter of just showing up—I was the one showing up. I was thinking, Wow, my father did this for me, my mother did this for me, and who is going to do this for this boy?
How did you imagine that you, a young American without funds, could ever save these seven children you found in a shack—brave the Maoist rebels, venture to Humla, and find their families?
In retrospect, I can imagine how strange it all seemed. I went to volunteer for three months, I fell in love with the kids, and I made a promise to them to return—very few people came back to see them. I didn't have any ambitions other than that. If someone had told me before I got involved that I would have tried to save these kids and find their parents, I would have said, absolutely not, that's not for me. But there are little steps that lead you down that road. And during the revolution all the children had been tricked, stolen by a trafficker, and here I had told them to trust a man coming to take them to safety. Every step takes you deeper and deeper, you have no choice. I didn't want to go into the mountains—I tried not to be that guy. I called every organization, but no one was going to rescue the kids. I took maps, photos of the children—and as long as it wasn't physically impossible, like climbing Everest, I could do it. I just started walking.
Instead of rushing back to Kathmandu when you heard about the seven children's disappearance, you decided to plan and create a nonprofit in America.
The kids needed to be found, but I didn't even have money for a plane ticket. The bigger issue was: what would I do once I got those kids? I knew we had to start a new children's home. I needed a real organization that people could trust to give money to. How do you start an organization? I took out books from the law library at NYU. I believed in my heart that the children were survivors—they needed someone to take care of them in a systematic way.
