Little Princes (33 page)

Eight

I
returned to Nepal after six weeks in the States, bearing photos of Liz and me from the day I proposed to her. The kids went berserk at the news.

“She really say yes, Brother? You are very sure?” asked Anish.

“I am very, very sure, Anish.”

“And her father? Her mother? They also say yes?”

“Yes, Anish—everybody said yes. Her mother said yes, her father said yes, she said yes. We are getting married.”

Only Priya and Yangani, the two girls, asked for details on how it happened. I told them that I had taken her down to the dock at her father’s farm, her favorite place in the world, after getting permission from her father.

“You sit on one knee, Brother? Like this?” Priya asked, getting down on one knee and holding up an invisible ring. She must have seen it in a movie.

“Yes, exactly like that. And I said ‘Elizabeth Lyons Flanagan, will you marry me?’ ”

The girls squealed.

“Do not forget about the dog, Conor,” Farid said. He had heard this story a few times now, and sat, amused, on the couch on the far side of the room, watching me regale the children.

Emma, Liz’s dog, had followed us down to the dock on her father’s farm, where I proposed. Somewhere between “Elizabeth” and “Flanagan,” Emma decided it was a good time to belly flop off the floating dock. Eighty pounds of dog hit the water just two feet away, soaking both Liz and me. Liz was laughing so hard that it took me a moment to work out if she had actually said yes. This became, predictably, the best part of the story for the kids. They made me tell it twice.

Farid and I spent a couple of days down in Godawari at Little Princes. I had missed them. But then it was time to get back to work. Our mission to find families would continue.

F
arid and I became more efficient at finding families in remote areas. We knew how to put together search teams and assemble the supplies we would need, and we knew how to ask the right questions. Actually reuniting the children with their families, though, turned out to be a much more complicated beast. Every parent was overjoyed to find their son or daughter again. But when they learned that their child was being well taken care of, they were suddenly reluctant to take him or her home. Nepal is a terribly poor country; it is a challenge to support a family.

I understood the parents’ perspective, but it put us in a difficult position. We were committed to doing what was best for the children, and the children were desperate to return home. We believed they had a
right
to be raised in their own homes, in their own communities—a belief shared by UNICEF and virtually all major child protection organizations. NGN existed to protect that right. Yet there were countless reasons why a child might not be able to return home. For example, one of their parents may have remarried; in Nepal, under those circumstances, the new stepmother or stepfather would rarely accept any children from the previous marriage. Sometimes we suspected abuse by an uncle or cousin. On several occasions we learned that the parent was actually aiding a child trafficker. All of these circumstances would put a returned child at risk.

One issue we thought we could overcome was the financial problem. By offering an impoverished parent a monthly stipend to help support their child in their own home, the family would be reunited, and it would cost us less than supporting the child at Dhaulagiri House. When a mother came to visit her son and indicated that she was eager to bring him home but would have difficulty paying for his food and education, we calculated how much she would need and offered her monthly support. The boy was reunited with his mother, and we monitored the situation closely.

It didn’t take long to conclude that this solution would not work. As it turned out, by supporting a family under these circumstances, we were, in effect, rewarding precisely those people who had chosen to give their children to traffickers. We learned that this was likely to inspire neighbors to send
their
child off with a child trafficker, hoping that they might miraculously end up in the hands of a Western nonprofit organization. Never mind that the great majority of these children never returned; the neighbors focused on the one child who
did
return safely and whose family was now being mysteriously rewarded for it.

Reunification was going to be much harder than we thought.

A
breakthrough came, as it always seemed to, at the tea shop.

Farid and I were talking about Solo Khumbu, the region in northern Nepal that spanned the tallest part of the Himalayan range—the home of Everest. Farid had made several trips to the region to spend time alone in the Buddhist villages, where he could stare at the stars and meditate with the monks. I was describing the glacier I had seen near Everest Base Camp, a long mass of ice and rock that was, at the same time, both unmovable and unstoppable.

“It’s like this work,” Farid said, with something between a laugh and a sigh.

“What, unmovable?”

“Unmovable, exactly,” he said. Then, after thinking about it for a moment, he added, “But you know, maybe also unstoppable. Everything just moves more slowly than we are used to, Conor. We cannot see the progress sometimes, I think. Maybe ‘Nepali time’ is a real thing,” he said.

“Nepali time” was an expression I heard probably once a day. It was always said by a Nepali who was well behind deadline, always to a foreigner who couldn’t understand why the deadline hadn’t been respected. Nepali time meant that everything moved slower in Nepal. I imagine many countries around the world have a similar expression.

Farid’s comment was profound. We spoke about Nepali time with disdain, as an excuse for laziness. Often it was, of course. But maybe, as Farid had suggested, it was more than that. Maybe it was the pace at which things
had
to move here. We had thought that reuniting children with their families should have been straightforward—either they could go back or they couldn’t. But what if it was more complicated than that? What if we were giving up too soon? What if, Farid suggested, instead of pressing a parent to take back a child when they visited, we slowed the process down? What if we just let a parent visit their children, with no pressure to take their child home?

Remarkably, this worked. Success was still rare, and we had to cultivate the relationship with the parent over a number of weeks, but it was worth it. Two of the children from Dhaulagiri, a brother and sister named Puspika and Pradip, were visited by their mother no fewer than six times in eight weeks. On the ninth week, she came and asked if she could bring her children home. We were helping families become reacquainted after years of separation.

Gradually, a few more children found their way home. Two cousins from Dhaulagiri, Kunja and Agrim, after spending two weeks with their mother over the course of several months and visiting the local school in their village, were able to return home. We continued to search for families. Nepal is such a difficult country to get around that Farid would be gone an entire week and come back to report he had managed to locate only three families. It was painstaking work. But the results were worth it.

“W
hat time is youR FLIGHT?” Farid asked. It was a morning in late September, and there was not a cloud in the sky. The rainy season was officially over.

“Five o’clock,” I said. It was nearly inconceivable that I was leaving Nepal.

Liz and I had tried to find a solution where she could live in Kathmandu with me. We had gone so far as to find a house next to Dhaulagiri; Liz had even gotten her dog, Emma, properly vaccinated for the big move and found somebody to rent her condo in DC. But it was just too difficult. Liz had been unable to find work in Kathmandu, and she had a good job back in the States. I also had to admit that returning to the United States was probably the best thing for NGN as an organization, since I would be able to fund-raise more effectively from there. We already had a great staff in place in Nepal to carry on the work. The difficulty for both Liz and me was knowing that we would be far away from the children.

My biggest concern was finding someone to replace me as country director. We needed somebody who could work well with Farid, somebody who shared our values, somebody who the children loved. We just couldn’t imagine who that could be.

Then, out of the blue, Farid called me one day and told me to meet him at the tea shop. The tea shop was run by Tibetans and served one dish: momos. Momos are similar to Chinese dumplings: steamed dough filled with vegetables or, as we preferred them, water buffalo. I came to find him sitting at our usual table—the only table outside, a dangerously unstable, rickety thing—sipping tea, staring out at the quiet street that encircled Swayambhu, near our children’s home, watching the Tibetan monks walking around a massive prayer wheel the size of a small car. They would turn it three times clockwise before moving on around the stupa or retreating back into the monastery just next to my own building. He had ordered me a lemon tea, which now sat next to him, steaming.

“Conor, I hope you are prepared for this discussion,” he said.

I sat down and took a cautious sip of my tea before adding a spoonful of coarse brown sugar from an open bowl on the table. “What discussion?” I asked.

“I am going to prove what karma can do for you,” he said, his voice deadpan.

I put down my tea. The woman brought out two plates of buffalo momos, one for each of us. Farid picked one off the plate with his fingers and popped it in his mouth.

Farid told me that one day earlier, he’d had a long conversation with Anna Howe. Anna, who helped us find Amita and facilitated my trip to Humla through D.B., had remained engaged with NGN. She and Farid had become close; Anna had been a practicing Buddhist for many years, and she and Farid had bonded over their shared beliefs.

Anna, Farid said, was leaving the ISIS Foundation. She loved the work and being with children, but she wanted to work for a smaller organization. She wanted to stay in Nepal, but she said it was unlikely she would find the perfect job. In her perfect world, she told him, she would work for an organization exactly like NGN, the very organization she had been so instrumental in helping to launch.

“Do you know any organizations like that, Conor? Which might be looking for a country director like Anna?” He was smiling now.

I couldn’t believe it. I thought I might have misheard him. I put down my tea and called Anna that moment, asking her if it was true that she might want to work with us, to potentially take my place as country director. She sounded as excited as me, saying what an incredible blessing this was, and that she would be absolutely honored to take the position.

After a short conversation, I hung up and put my phone down on the table. I took a sip of my tea, and Farid and I sat in silence for a few moments.

“That’s amazing,” I said finally.

“It is amazing,” he confirmed.

That had been just three weeks earlier. Since then, Anna, Farid, and I had spent a lot of time together. She had come with us earlier that morning, my final morning in Nepal, when I said good-bye to the children at Dhaulagiri.

At the leaving ceremony at Dhaulagiri, I had sat in a chair where I would receive a tikka and flowers. First in line were the staff. Ganesh and Devaka, the house father and mother, wished me a safe trip. Then came the cooking and cleaning
didis
who worked with us, Moti and Sunita. Then it was the children’s turn. They stood in a line while I sat in place. Some were shy, handing me flowers and sloppily smushing a small tikka on my forehead before giggling and running off. They were having a grand time, as I knew they would—it was like a festival for them. Most of them had little sense that I was leaving the country.

Farid joined us for a final group photo, then it was time to leave. We were heading up to the main road when I saw Amita. She stood in the path, her arms spread wide, blocking my exit. I didn’t try to get around her. I just stood in front of her in silence, waiting for her permission to leave. Her scowl faded into a reluctant smile. I took her in a big hug, picking her up. Then Kumar leaped on, and Samir and Dirgha and Bishnu, those beloved children who had started it all. Then all the kids joined in, in a massive, spontaneous thirty-person group hug that ended when we tumbled over under the sheer body weight.

We passed my apartment on the way up the road. Farid and I would travel together down to Godawari so I could say good-bye to the Little Princes. I told Farid I wanted to just stop by my apartment to take a quick shower before going to see the kids.

“I would wait to take a shower until after you see the Little Princes, Conor,” Farid said thoughtfully. “The tikka the boys put on your face—it is not subtle.”

“They’re not covering my face with tikka this time,” I assured Farid. “They can do a little bit, if they put it on the tip of their finger, like the Dhaulagiri kids, but that’s it.”

Farid smiled. “Ah. Yes, of course you’re right, Conor. Very good plan.”

R
aju was applying a fistful of tikka to my temple when I noticed that his other fist was also filled with the rice and red dye.

“Raju—no. No. No more. No more tikka, Raju.”

He paused, confused. “Luck, Conor Brother!”

“I have luck already. The first tikka is luck. I don’t need two tikkas for luck.” I saw Santosh sneaking up behind me with another fistful of tikka. I spun around.

“Santosh! No. I’m serious. No more tikka,” I said as sternly as I could.

“No tikka on your cheeks yet, Brother,” he protested. “Very bad luck!”

“It’s not
supposed
to be on my cheeks, Santosh. It is supposed to be a small area on my forehead. You would do this to a Nepali man? Cover his face in tikka? You would do this to Hari?”

“You are traveling very very far, Conor Brother! More luck needed!”

I stood up and went to the bathroom mirror. My forehead was covered in the thick red paste. It looked like I’d been in a car accident. I took a rag to wipe some of the excess tikka off.