A quest to reunite Nepal's lost children with their families
A quest to reunite Nepal's lost children with their families
By MEGHAN MITCHELL, QMI AGENCY
Last Updated: January 31, 2011 12:00am
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Conor Grennan is pictured with some of the children from the Little Princes Children’s Home. (Supplied Photo)
When American Conor Grennan decided to up and quit his job to embark on a one year around-the-world trip, his family and friends weren’t as thrilled as he thought they’d be.
“I was going to be going around the world and I thought I could just get away with that,” said Grennan during a recent interview to promote his memoir Little Princes. “But as it turned out, everybody thought that that was pretty self-indulgent.”
As a way to balance things out, he decided to spend the first three months of his trip volunteering at an orphanage in war-torn Nepal in 2004.
“I should make it clear that I didn’t really think it was a civil war going on,” he said. “(I wasn’t expecting it to) be the full-blown war that I saw when I landed there.”
Grennan had every intention to get through the three months and never think about it again. That was until he learned that the children living at the Little Princes Children’s Home had been keeping something about their past a secret.
What the children had been hiding was that many of them were not actually orphans, but instead victims of child trafficking.
“I think that once we found out that they weren’t orphans… it just changed everything,” said Grennan, who made it his mission to reunite these children with their parents.
“I realized the only future for these children is to make sure that they’re reconnected with their families – people who can take care of them – and having their families understand that they’re still alive, still out there.”
The reunification process would be no easy task, since the families of these children were living in the remote, mountainous regions of Nepal accessible primarily by foot.
But shortly after the civil war had ended, and a peace agreement had been signed between the Maoist rebels and Nepal’s government, Grennan, armed with a document similar to an affidavit from the head of the Maoist party, decided it was time to face the treacherous terrain and make his way to Humla in search of the children’s families.
“I went literally two weeks after the peace agreement was actually signed, so I was really concerned,” he said. “I didn’t know if the Maoist rebels even knew that the war was over.”
Overcoming an injury on the first day and being snowed in on the second, Grennan was able to begin tracking down families to inform them that their children were alive.
But he also warned them that their children were very lucky. He told these families - who had paid large sums of money to a man who had promised to keep their children safe – that the man they had given their children to was actually a child trafficker.
“When they didn’t hear from (their children)… a lot of them must have known that their children had been usually sold or something to that affect,” he said. “(But) I got the sense from other parents - who we hadn’t found their children – that they were still very able to hold out hope that maybe their children had ended up in a good spot.”
Many children are not so lucky – ending up as servants or being forced to beg in the streets or even dying from malnutrition and/or disease.
“It makes me sick to think about, but some of them just wouldn’t have survived,” said Grennan, when asked how he felt his work in Nepal has affected the lives of the children he’s helped. “And we see it too often where kids don’t survive these things.”
Grennan’s quest to reconnect trafficked children with their parents has become a life cause for both him and his wife Liz – who was an American volunteering out there when they met. It is also the reason that he founded the nonprofit organization - Next Generation Nepal – which has funded transitional children’s homes in Kathmandu and Humla, as well as continuing to reunite trafficked children with their families.
And some of the older children have started helping NGN with its work – leading search teams into the mountains to help find parents and sharing their stories with parents of other trafficked children.
“It’s a much more powerful story, hearing from the child – ‘This is what happened to me, you know, and this is what you’re putting your child through if you do this’. So we’re actually integrating them into the organization in a great way and it’s amazing,” he said.
“To see them so passionate about helping their villages and so passionate about giving back and so passionate about making sure that this doesn’t happen to other kids is just beyond inspiring.”