I had my guide/translator. Moreover, Rinjin recommended an excellent porter and said he would arrange for him to join us. But I still needed one more to round out my four-man team. Rinjin told me the best person for the job was a young man named Min Bahadur, a member of the help staff at the local UNICEF outpost in Simikot. As I was already planning on meeting with UNICEF the next day, I would discuss it with him then.
Puspika, the head of the three-person UNICEF office, knew of Golkka. They had been trying to stop him for two years. She warned me to travel in a large group. She said she hoped I had not told too many people where I was going; even in Kathmandu, Golkka had a way of learning about these things. The roots of his network ran deep in southern Humla, she told me, and they would not be happy to learn that we were educating families about the dangers of sending their children away with Golkka’s men in hopes of a better life for them.
During our conversation, a tall, lanky young man in his late twenties came in and served us tea with a happy grin. Puspika thanked him. When he left, I noticed she had a smile on her face; the man’s grin was contagious. I realized that this was the man Rinjin had been speaking about. Puspika confirmed it a moment later.
“You know, that man who just served us, his name is Min Bahadur,” she said. “He has been working with us for eight years. There is nobody I trust more, and nobody who knows the region better. If you can wait three days, our office will close for the holiday and he can join you.”
I thanked her, but explained that we had to leave the next day. The snow was coming soon. She nodded, understanding.
“I will ask him for you, then. I will leave the decision up to him,” she said, standing up. I thanked her for her time and thoughtfulness, and left to meet D.B. I found him at the local market, a wooden shack selling only rice and lentils, with no vegetables except for a few potatoes. Southern Humla was so poor that we would carry our own rice and lentils, knowing it would be difficult for villagers to spare anything. Our porters would bear the load.
In my own bag, which I kept close to me at all times, I was carrying something equally valuable: a blue waterproof folder containing photos and short bios of twenty-four children. It was the only information I had to go on, and I had read it through so many times I had practically memorized it.
The next morning we were ready to head south. As we sipped our tea outside, clutching the steel mugs to warm our hands against the chill of the morning, I watched as a smile spread across Rinjin’s face. I turned around to see what he was looking at. Walking up the path was Min Bahadur, cloaked in a heavy jacket and flashing his contagious grin. He was coming with us.
When we finished our tea, D.B. spoke to Rinjin in Nepali for a few minutes, then turned to me.
“We have one more stop to make—you remember?” he said.
“I remember.”
It would have been difficult to forget. Before we could travel into southern Humla, before we could even leave the borders of Simikot, we needed the permission of the Maoist leader.
The peace agreement in Nepal had been signed the week before I arrived in Humla, but the Maoists had already established their presence in Simikot, setting up in a small wooden house next to the marginally better-constructed army headquarters. It was a surreal sight, the red hammer and sickle flying just a few yards away from the Nepalese flag. The rebels now worked literally next door to the very buildings they had spent years bombing under the cover of night.
I walked into their building. It was discomfiting, to say the least. The United States government had sided with the king’s government in the conflict. That meant my government had provided them with military aid to fight the rebels. The Maoists had no love for Americans.
But there was no avoiding it: the road to the children’s families led through that door. Southern Humla was Maoist territory and had been for ten years. We were not sure if most of the rebels—former rebels, as of a few days earlier—would uphold the new peace treaty. Or, for that matter, if they were even aware the treaty had been signed.
Like everyone else in the high-altitude village, the Maoist leaders sat outside where they could be warmed by the sun. They sat in a row, four of them, on broken plastic chairs, waiting for us. Even the rickety chairs were a luxury—Humli people sat on woven mats on the ground. Chairs were usually reserved for wealthier individuals and government officials. The Maoists were behaving like the rightful heirs to the royal regime.
The Maoist district secretary sat looking like a man confident that he had earned the respect we were paying him by our visit. He wore a simple gray woolen hat that peaked about six inches above his head, stretching out his already thin features. The three officials at his side wore no jungle fatigues and carried no guns.
We greeted them respectfully and took the two empty chairs next to them.
I did not have a translator, but I understood pieces of the conversation, and I watched D.B.’s body language. He was humble and respectful and introduced me early on, conveniently failing to mention my nationality. They picked up on the omission and asked him directly where I was from. D.B. told them I was Irish. Technically that was true. I had brought my Irish passport and left my American one in Kathmandu.
D.B. told the story of Humla’s children, what was happening to them, how they were being taken from their villages and abandoned in the streets of Kathmandu. The Maoists paid me little attention. That was a good thing. D.B. would almost certainly be allowed into the region; he was a local, after all. Whether I would be granted the same access was unclear.
One can only listen to a discussion in a foreign language for so long before it becomes achingly dull, even, apparently, if one’s entire purpose for being there depended on the outcome of that discussion. This is especially true if you are sitting in the midday sun. Two hours later, my eyelids were sliding closed when the men leaped up and vigorously shook my hand. It scared the bejesus out of me to wake up to a throng of Maoists lunging at me, but I recovered in time to stop myself from instinctively hurling defensive, groggy punches at our hosts, an action that would likely have been something of a setback to D.B.’s diplomatic efforts. I shook hands with the men while D.B. picked his bag up off the ground. I caught his eye.
“That seemed to go okay,” I said in a low voice.
“Better than okay,” D.B. replied quietly, zipping up his bag. “You’ll see.”
He was right. That evening, an envelope was delivered to us by a local boy. D.B. took it from him, waited for him to leave, then carefully withdrew the single page inside. I saw from the light of his flashlight a document with red letterhead that was, surprisingly, written in English. It read “Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).” The rest of the text was in Nepali. D.B. translated it for me. Amazingly, it detailed our exact mission: to find the families of the lost children of Humla. Most important, it instructed all Maoist cadres in the area to assist us in any way.
“Well—that certainly can’t hurt,” I marveled.
“No,” D.B. said, smiling. “It certainly cannot hurt.”
We set off the next day. The trail appeared to drop straight down. It reminded me of those short-breathed moments skiing, at the beginning of a run, peering over a sheer drop. I couldn’t see how anybody got down this thing. Min Bahadur was first over, and I saw that he had jumped down onto a switchback that crisscrossed the mountain in broad, sweeping strokes. The Karnali River twisted two thousand feet below.
This was what the Humli would call a hill, but I called a mountain. To the Humli, mountains were the Himalaya, requiring ice axes and crampons—and oxygen tanks for the international climbers. Southern Humla was ringed by these snow-capped monoliths. These were the foothills of the Himalaya; the trail south would follow the Karnali River. Our path, the only path in the entire region, was narrow, wide enough for one person. It was slippery with mud and loose shale, and it rose so sharply in some places that you needed to grip t
he boulders and pull yourself up. I lost my footing several times on the first descent. Each time, Rinjin grabbed the straps of my pack and caught me. He took his job as guide seriously.
My knees and thighs took enough of a beating on the downhill that the flat ground felt almost relaxing, like I had landed on a moving walkway. I looked back up the mountain. Coming down was difficult; going back up would be worse. Luckily I had almost three weeks before I had to worry about that. Less, if we kept this pace.
A few minutes later, we were at the Karnali. We would have to cross it to continue south, since the only path was on the western side of the river. There was one problem: the Maoists had blown up the bridge.
The Maoists had destroyed almost every bridge in Humla in order to keep the army out. When villagers or bomb-toting Maoists bound for Simikot had needed to cross, they were ferried on makeshift cables. Men stood at each end of a cable strung over the river and pulled people across, collecting a few rupees for their service from each passenger. We were eight men with full packs; the men could expect a decent payday. One by one we climbed into the small metal containers suspended twenty feet up—the steel cage was an upgrade since the conflict, I was told—and traversed the river.
The porters led the way along the small single-track paths that had never seen a wheel, which had been carved out by the feet of villagers and long convoys of sheep and children chasing after stray buffalo. For hours we saw no villages at all. We moved at a terrific pace; even Min Bahadur, normally happily chatting to the other men despite bearing the heaviest load, had gone silent. I could barely keep up with them, and it wasn’t just their superior strength and stamina. The two-hour descent and subsequent three-hour speed-walk had taken a toll on my knees.
Winter afternoons in Humla give way quickly to evening. By six we had reached our destination. It seemed to be the only destination unless we were prepared to sleep outside—the next shelter was many hours away. Rinjin told me the place was called Bokche Ganda, though the only thing I could see was a single lean-to, the kind I used to make as a child in the woods behind my house, except this one was large enough to sleep twenty men and didn’t look like it would come crashing down on me the moment I climbed in with my comic books. I pulled off my boots, watching the men make a fire with maddening effortlessness. In my experience, making a fire required several hours of pained labor, virulent cursing, and about forty dollars’ worth of lighter fluid. I would not survive one day here alone.
The porters served up enormous plates of daal bhat, boiling hot right out of the fire, which we ate while sitting on the cold ground. I crashed immediately after the heavy meal, listening to the men chatter into the night, drinking tea and stoking the fire to keep warm.
Even just a few hours into southern Humla, it was clear how parents here could be cut off from their children in Kathmandu. It took days to get anywhere. Poverty was everywhere; most villagers were fed by the World Food Programme. There was no electricity, and houses were one-room mud huts. There was virtually no medicine: the health posts had been abandoned. If villagers had to move around at night, they lit their way using flaming torches, like they were hunting Frankenstein. I didn’t know these places still existed.
We broke camp at dawn. It was still very cold, even having descended three thousand feet from where the plane dropped us off in Simikot. The surrounding mountains were so high that the sun wouldn’t reach us until after 9:00 A.M. We had tea and biscuits to warm up before we started moving; the morning daal bhat would be cooked in a few hours when we stopped for a break. We had a full day’s walk ahead of us.
As I sat up in my bed of scattered hay under the lean-to, my back ached. It was stiff from the cold and from sleeping on the ground. Climbing out of my sleeping bag, though, I discovered a far worse problem: a sharp pain in my knee. I took a few excruciating steps and sat down on a rock.
I couldn’t believe it. Half a day into a three-week journey on foot with men who speed over these trails as if on Rollerblades, and I was hobbling and wincing in pain. It wan’t the pain that bothered me, though I was pretty unhappy about it; it was the knowledge that there was no medical attention for miles. If I continued to hike at that pace, I could seriously damage my knee and would have to be carried out. That really, really could not happen.
Fishing around in my medical kit, I pulled out two strong painkillers and swallowed them with tea. I wrapped a bandage tight around my knee to stabilize it, then tried walking again, boosting myself up with my walking poles. Thank God for my walking poles. I had bought them at the last minute on Anna’s advice; now they were suddenly critical to my mobility. Even with the poles, though, I could do little more than hobble.
Embarrassed, I broke the news to D.B. and Rinjin. They were kind and concerned about my health, and made sure I was sitting down before they went to talk among themselves. D.B. came back and sat down next to me.
“We can go back to Simikot, Conor. I will take you myself—we can walk as slowly as you need. Walking uphill will be easier than downhill, we can reach Rinjin’s guesthouse by tonight,” he said.
“I’m fine, D.B. I’m slow, I know. I don’t want to slow everybody down, and I know that I will. But I can keep going if the others don’t mind.” I hated to ask that; I felt like a whining little brother. But it was the only way I could continue.
He nodded and went back to tell the others. I saw them looking over at me as they packed up the camp. I couldn’t meet their eyes.
Keeping my leg straight and leaning so heavily on my poles that I was petrified they would snap, I was the first of the group to set off. I was determined to prove that I would not slow us down to a crawl. I gripped my poles, stayed focused on the rocky path, and blinked away the tears of pain welling in my eyes, grateful that nobody was in front of me to see. I said a silent prayer, asking God only for the painkillers to kick in, and swore that if I ever made it back I would name my first child “Walking Poles.”
Two days in, Rinjin stopped and pointed south, where the river curved.
“We reach there, we will be very close to Ripa,” he said, patting my arm. I was leading the eight-man team—D.B. insisted on it. It was the only reliable way to keep the group moving at my slowed pace. As we approached a path leading up the side of a cliff, D.B. wanted to make sure I wasn’t left behind.
I walked slowly along trails carved into the cliff walls. To my left was a sheer drop one hundred feet down into the river. In a way, I felt like I already knew Ripa. Bikash was from that village, as was his brother Ishan and several other kids from Little Princes. They spoke about it often. They told me of the steeply sloping terraces leading down to the white water of the Karnali, the cluster of mud huts built almost on top of one another, the nearby woods where the children collected herbs and spices for their families to sell. I wondered if the images they had painted would bear any resemblance to the real thing.
Min Bahadur barked out a single word. My daydream vanished. I had no idea what the word meant. I looked back. All seven men in our team had thrown themselves against the rock, as if they and the granite cliff wall had suddenly become magnetized. I heard Rinjin shouting a translation, but I didn’t wait for it. I pressed myself against the rock as hard as I could. The ground shook. I felt them before I saw them: a herd of perhaps a hundred goats, laden with what looked to be rice-filled saddle bags, came streaming around the corner of the cliff trail. How they kept their footing I had no idea; I only knew that I couldn’t keep mine. I gripped the rock tightly, terrified, and felt the surge of animals race past me in a cloud of dust, chased by a shepherd who ignored us completely.
I was still gripping the rock when Rinjin approached me, telling me it was safe to let go.
“If you see a herd like this, it is important to stay to the inside,” he said, his hand tight on my shoulder, staring at me.
“I got that—stay inside when I see the goats. Thanks.”
“Oth
erwise, you will end up in the river,” he clarified, pointing down, in case there was any doubt. “The goats, they do not fall. Humli people, we do not fall. But you, you fall.”
“Yep, I saw that. I saw it just now, with the goats.”
“You did very well. It is very good you did not fall. You climbed very high on that wall, like a monkey,” he said, looking up at the cliff wall.
“Yeah, well, I almost peed my pants, so—”
“You have to pee?”
“No, I don’t have to—no. No, I’m good. Let’s keep going. Thanks.”
Whether any of the children’s families still lived in Ripa, I had no idea. But I was about to find out. The sky was graying as we entered the village up a sharp rise in the path. A cluster of mud huts was perched on a terraced slope, just as Bikash had described. Most of the huts shared walls; they were built practically on top of one another.
It had been an agonizing day, pounding on my inflamed knee for eight straight hours. Ripa, to me, was Shangri-La. It was the Four Seasons. I felt the pain more acutely knowing I was going to stop soon, and I hobbled openly for the first time, relieved we would be staying the night.
I was now last in the line of eight men, though Rinjin stayed just a few feet ahead of me. Walking through the narrow spaces between the huts, I was suddenly enclosed by villagers. They had seen us coming—or me coming, anyway. My pasty arms were pale enough to be seen for miles—they must have looked like light sabers next to the complexion of my colleagues. The villagers gave me a wide berth. Most gawked at me from their roofs. They shouted the occasional question at D.B., the leader of our pack, and the questions were clearly about me. I felt like a caged baboon being wheeled through some nineteenth-century town on its way to the circus tent.
Absorbing the stares of the villagers, I had no inhibition about staring right back at them. The women wore large, gold-plated nose rings and earrings and dozens of beaded necklaces. Some of them were gripping oar-length poles, poised to pound them against smooth, round stones, the middle of which were carved into a bowl, though I couldn’t see what was inside—wheat, I imagined, to make flour. Other women were lugging wicker baskets on their backs stacked high with firewood. As is customary in Nepalese villages, the men seemed to be doing little but squatting on the ground, drinking tea, and watching the women work. Certainly they were not looking out for the babies; that job was left to the daughters, who were carrying the little ones on their backs, wrapped in handmade blankets of rough cloth.