“Anyway. I’m just glad you’re home,” she said.
My mother left the next day to go back to Florida, where she had moved permanently. She was going to put the Jersey City house on the market, but she would wait until I had found an apartment of my own.
Two days later, my friends started calling. Every night a different group of friends, friends I hadn’t seen in more than a year, took me out to celebrate my homecoming. For the first time in ten years, I had come home to stay, to find a job, to settle down. We talked about what neighborhood of New York City I should live in and which women they thought I should meet. There was much talk around candidates for blind dates. They insisted on picking up the tabs in bars and restaurants across the city. “Please—you’ve been off saving orphans,” they would say. “This is the least we can do.”
I know I should have politely refused their generous offers. But the food . . . the food was just so beautiful. It was wonderful. It was delicious. I should have been filming commercials for TGI Friday’s, the way my face flushed with ecstasy with every bite of a potato skin. I ate anything that didn’t have rice. I relished drinking water straight from the tap, guzzling it without fear of parasites. Beer tasted heavenly. I ate my first piece of chocolate in four months.
And everything, everywhere, seemed squeaky clean. Everyone in the city was dressed in clothes that positively gleamed, in collared shirts, gorgeously pressed and starched. Nobody wore the same clothes even two days in a row, let alone two months in a row. No fleece for miles around—no flip-flops, either. Everywhere the sweet symphony of English, of new cars humming, of air-conditioning sweeping through rooms, of toilets flushing. Perhaps the strangest feeling of all was seeing children, so many of them with glowing white skin, that unfortunate translucent paleness that I shared. After months of rich, brown skin of a thousand shades, it looked like these children had been bleached.
During the days, I was putting together my résumé. It was hopelessly out-of-date. I had decided I would get back into public policy. It seemed like the right transition, and I knew I could get a job fairly easily, which was important after being without a salary for so long. New York was expensive, and I was broke. On my résumé I listed the work I had done for the EastWest Institute in Prague and Brussels. I hoped the year of travel wouldn’t count against me. And under the final section, the one titled Other Interests, I wrote “Little Princes Children’s Home, Nepal: Volunteer.”
That was it. The entire experience, living for months with eighteen children, each one unique and crazy and swimming in my memory, boiled down to a single line that would likely never be read. And maybe that was how it should be, I thought. It was time to move on—to a real job, to dating, to starting a life near my family and friends.
But I struggled with the moving-on part. I had already written four e-mails to the Little Princes e-mail address. I knew that Farid or Hari would read them to the children. I wrote to Hari to ask him to go check on the seven children when they landed at the Umbrella Foundation—when the political situation calmed down, of course—to tell them that we were thinking of them. I wanted to send them the photos I had taken of them. I found myself wanting to maintain that connection, not to be a volunteer who disappeared back into his everyday life once he had left Nepal.
As I tried to start the job hunt, I was distracted by the news from Nepal as it unfolded live on CNN. People were taking to the streets, not at the orders of the Maoists, though the rebels did all they could to support it, but at the urging of the political parties that had been kicked out of parliament when the king had seized power. Protests were organized by activists and promoted by journalists—the ones not yet thrown in jail.
Nepal had reached a boiling point. King Gyanendra, desperate to maintain his grip on power, had issued a curfew to stop the protests against his autocratic regime. When that failed, he gave the orders for the police to shoot protestors on sight. Eight people were shot dead on the street on the first day of protests.
The Maoist uprising was now a popular uprising, and it grew stronger by the hour. Farid, who had made it back to France, and I kept in close touch by e-mail. We shared any information we had, any rumors, any news from our friends and colleagues in Nepal. We marveled at the images on TV, at the faces of these peaceful, wonderful, loving people, suddenly crazed with passion, with determination, with revolution, with the spirit that drives men and women to stand on front lines and absorb bullets and batterings to win freedom for those who stand behind them.
The king had sealed his fate with the killings. It seemed the entire country had descended on the streets of Kathmandu. On April 24, 2006, the monarchy crumbled. The king, with the citizens of Nepal literally beating at the door to the royal palace, announced the reinstatement of the democratically elected parliament. This announcement, the only announcement he could make, may have saved his life. The faces of the people, the close-ups with a CNN logo hovering in the bottom right corner of the screen, told stories of relief, disbelief, jubilation, and optimism.
I turned off the TV. I felt like I had been watching for days. Nepal still had a long road ahead of it—What of the Maoists? What of the king? Who would rule Nepal?—but for now the country had untied itself from the railway tracks. I thought about those faces on TV. They were fathers and mothers, expressing a joy that came from making a difference, from making the world a better place for their children. I swelled with pride for my foster country. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, our children—the Little Princes and the seven children—had a brighter future ahead of them.
Then the e-mail came that changed everything.
The e-mail was from Viva Bell. With the uprising, it had taken their team three weeks to get across town to pick up the children. It had been impossible to move in Kathmandu before that; nothing could ply the roads. Once the king was overthrown, it took them just two days to organize a small van to get the children. Jacky, Viva’s partner, went with two of their staff—two women, who could comfort the children when they were picked up. Jacky found the shack without any problem, the directions were perfect. He opened the gate, greeted Nuraj’s mother and her young son with a smile, and walked inside the shack.
The seven children were gone.
The mother told Jacky that Golkka had gotten word that the children were going to be rescued. Golkka somehow knew my name, and he knew that I had been speaking to the government’s Child Welfare Board about the children and their plight. Golkka knew exactly how to exploit the law to remain out of jail, but he recognized these seven children, their very existence, because of the conditions in which they lived, could be used as evidence against him—evidence he might not be able to refute in a criminal case.
Golkka took no chances. The moment the king was overthrown and the curfews lifted, he struck. He took the children away under the cover of a euphoric capital. He kidnapped them so they could not create problems for him. In the race for the children, he had beaten Umbrella by forty-eight hours. And just like that, they had vanished.
Haunting me were the last words I had said to the children before I left them. I told them that somebody was coming for them, somebody who they could trust. Somebody who would take them to a safe place, where there would be many children and they could go to school and be well fed and sleep in beds and have proper shoes. They didn’t believe it. They had heard this before, from their mothers and fathers in their villages in Humla, right before they were taken and abandoned and left without food or proper shelter. I sat beside them and looked them in the eye and told them I understood. I promised them that this time, it was true.
Three weeks later, somebody did come for them, just as I had promised. But not to take them to a safe place. Amita and Dirgha and little Bishnu and the others—they would all know by now that I had betrayed them. That I was just like the others. The only difference, as I was all too aware, was that this time, nobody knew where they were.
I read and re-read that e-mail from Viva, sitting in the same bedroom where I had spent much of my childhood. The phone rang twice, friends calling back to tell me which bar we were meeting at that night. I let it ring. When I looked up at the clock again, I saw that I had been sitting there for more than an hour, staring at that e-mail. It was now dark out.
Next to my computer I kept a notebook of my job search. It was meticulously organized, a sign of my excitement. The prospect of rejoining this life 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. And it would be in America, near my family, where everybody spoke English and where we shared a common history and cultural references.
I took one last look at those pages, of the list of institutes and companies who I thought I might work for, of the pros and cons of each, of the approximate starting salaries of each position. Then I tore those pages out. On a fresh sheet of paper, I wrote down the names of the seven children: Navin, Madan, Samir, Dirgha, Amita, Kumar, Bishnu.
I turned back to my laptop and composed an e-mail to Farid. I explained what had happened, including the entire text of Viva’s e-mail. I ended my message with a single line: “I’m going back to Nepal.”
He responded immediately from France: “I’m coming with you.”
My instinct was to buy a plane ticket that day. I could borrow the money for it; I could be in Kathmandu by the end of the week. With the recent violence, flights would be empty. But what would I do when I landed? Finding the children would be a near impossibility in Kathmandu, a city of one million. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had flooded into the city during the civil war. Thousands of children had disappeared. I wouldn’t know where to begin. This would take more planning than I was used to, and that frustrated me. I was not a good planner. I was good at making quick, rash decisions, of hurling myself into difficult situations, making the best of it, then squirming out of them again.
What was I supposed to do first? I took out my notebook and listed the steps. I came up with one, and it wasn’t even the first step: Go to Kathmandu. After that, I was lost. I put down my pen and stewed some more. The more I stewed, the angrier I got. All I had been trying to do in Nepal was get seven children out of harm’s way. To bring them across town to a children’s home. That was it. I wasn’t trying to be Mother Teresa. And still I had failed.
I looked at the photos from Nepal, of the jubilation in the streets after the king’s resignation. That made me even angrier. Why weren’t Nepalis looking for these kids? These were their children, not mine. But all they could do was celebrate, as if everything was all better now. Nobody cared about these vanished children. If a five-year-old boy went missing in the United States, it would be front-page news for days. Entire towns would hold vigils. Millions of dollars would be spent to find him. The governor would hold a press conference. In Kathmandu, seven children vanished into thin air and nobody even missed them. Of course they didn’t—they had saps like me bringing them rice and calling everybody I knew to try to put them in a home.
Farid let me ramble until I had exhausted my bluster, then he wrote back. He told me, in his undiplomatic way, that I was being—what was the word in English?—unjust. I was being unjust toward these people. (He later added “irrational” after consulting a dictionary.) He didn’t explain himself; he didn’t need to. My fiery anger was dunked into Farid’s pool of reason and emerged, dripping, as guilt. I had spent all my money traveling around the world. I would never struggle to get medical attention for my children, or to keep them out of the hands of armed men trying to abduct them. I would never watch my friends and neighbors waste away from starvation. I would never pray to God for rain to keep crops alive. But if I ever did experience even a fraction of one of these fears, I was certain, I had to admit, that I would not spend my time worrying about children I had never met. I would be concerned about keeping my own family alive.
I began to think more rationally. Farid and I spent entire days brainstorming. A quick move back to Kathmandu would do us no good; we had no resources. Even if by some miracle we found some of the children, how would we support them? How would we protect them? They could stay at Umbrella temporarily, but I knew in my heart that these seven children were not Umbrella’s responsibility. They were mine. Umbrella had done their part to rescue them and keep them safe. They needed a home, and if we were going after them, then it was also our responsibility to give them a home. I had promised them that before I left. Until we raised enough money to give them some stability, there was little point in returning.
A plan was taking shape.
I needed to raise money. I wrote that down. It became the step before “Fly to Kathmandu.” I had raised a little money in the past through my travel blog, writing about Little Princes. I needed a better structure. People would need to be convinced that this was a real venture, that there was a tax deduction in it for them. How I was going to find these people was a different story; I ignored that step for now. I needed an official nonprofit organization.
The problem was, of course, that I had no idea how to start a nonprofit organization. I asked friends and the contacts of friends, and every one of them recommended that I hire a lawyer to set it up. A lawyer? I thought, hanging up with a friend of mine who had started a nonprofit. I can barely afford to buy groceries. Unwilling to give up food, I located a law library in New York City, and started commuting in every day to do research. After two weeks, I felt like I had a grasp of how to do it myself. But that was only the beginning—it was like buying a car without knowing how to drive. There were pages and pages of legal documents required for the organization. They asked questions that should have been basic, the answers should have rolled off my tongue. What is your mission? How are you going to accomplish it? What is your strategy? How much money will you raise? Who is on your board of directors? I had no idea. I wanted to find children, but I didn’t know how much that would cost. I wanted to give them a home, but I had no idea how to accomplish that.
Launching this organization in Nepal was consuming all my time. I had no social life at all now. I tried to distract my single-mindedness by watching television in the evenings, but I only got through thirty minutes before I went back to work. It was exhausting, never more so than when I tried to sleep. It took ages to try to relax, to calm my mind enough to actually fall asleep. Thoughts, ideas, people I could talk to or meet—they all careened through my mind as if on a Roller Derby, elbowing one another in the face to vie for my attention. But one night, I was actually awoken out of a dead sleep by an idea. This one had serious momentum. It was soon moving with such speed around my head that I found myself sitting bolt upright, feet on the floor. I knew what we were going to do. I stumbled to my computer and wrote to Farid.
I wrote without preamble:
We can find their families, the families of the children. The families of the Little Princes, for starters, and of the seven children if we ever find them. Think about it—there’s a truce. The Royal Nepalese Army is no longer fighting. The rebels have called a cease-fire. Nobody is going to want to fight now that the king is out of power. We have a window of opportunity to go to Humla. We might be able to pass freely into the villages without getting kidnapped or attacked, especially if the Maoists are trying to become a legitimate political party. The future of Nepal depends on reconnecting this lost, displaced generation with their families and communities. We could try, right? Do you think that could work?
It must have been early morning in France, but Farid wrote back in less than an hour:
Conor, I like this idea very much. We must try this.
Our mission statement was vague, but I knew what we meant. We would rescue trafficked children. We would try to find their families. That was enough for the documents, at least. I didn’t specify that we were only thinking about rescuing seven children, and that finding them, let alone their families, might prove impossible.
I was even more vague on the strategy questions and the fund-raising questions. How would we find the children? I had no idea. Talking to the government for starters, maybe. How much money would we need? Not sure—I estimated about twelve thousand dollars. The only real expenses were flying to Nepal and opening a children’s home, not just for seven but for two dozen, maybe. One by one, I filled in answers—guesses, really—to these questions. I tried to be specific enough to not attract attention to the fact that I had no idea what I was doing.
When it was completed, I realized one line was still blank: the name of the organization. Nothing came to mind. So I spent the evening saying potential organization names aloud to myself, introducing myself together with those names and imagining how each would sound with a Nepali accent. I came up with a few good names. All of them were taken. I remembered the e-mail to Farid, about the lost generation of kids. So I settled for one where the acronym wouldn’t spell some kind of curse word. I named the organization Next Generation Nepal.
Now I was not only coming up with steps, I was actually checking some off. I am easily inspired by measurable progress, and I worked even harder. I would go two or three days in a row without leaving the house, planted in front of my computer. I reconnected with some of the brightest and most compassionate former colleagues from my eight years at the EastWest Institute and convinced them to serve on the NGN Board of Directors. I filled out pages of IRS applications for tax-exempt status. I wrote in my blog about the organization. I asked my immediate family members for a very early Christmas present: a donation to NGN. I asked my friends to help the orphans they had read so much about on my blog over the last year. I asked other friends to help me throw small fund-raisers.
The fund-raisers were the first moments I realized I was actually going to do this. I had to stand up in front of fifty people who had given twenty dollars each and announce that NGN would be the first organization (or at least the first one that I’d heard of, and I had done a lot of research) to not only stop trafficking in Nepal, but to try to reverse it. We would search the hills and mountains of Nepal, in some of the most remote regions in the world, until we found the families of trafficked children. People clapped. I did not add that I might be completely full of crap.