Even around the house, the children at Little Princes could entertain themselves far more efficiently than I ever could. I made a mistake early on of buying them toy cars during one of my trips to Kathmandu—eighteen little cars, one for each of them. They loved them so much they literally jumped for joy. I felt like a Vanderbilt, presenting gifts to the less fortunate. The longest-surviving car of the eighteen lasted just under twenty-four hours. I found little tires and car doors scattered around the house and garden. Nishal and Hriteek, the pair of six-year-olds, shared the last car between them, sliding the wheel-less chassis back and forth across the concrete front porch a few times before running out to play soccer with a ball they had made out of an old sock stuffed with newspaper.
Though they would never admit it, the kids had far more fun with the toys they made themselves. One boy, usually Santosh, would take a plastic bottle from the trash discarded throughout the village. To this bottle he strapped two short pieces of wood, binding them with some old string. He collected four plastic bottle caps and some rusty nails and pounded them into the wood with a flat rock. And voilà! he had built a toy car. When it wobbled too much going down the hill, he discovered that he could stabilize it by filling the bottle with water. Soon it was racing down shallow hills and crashing into trees. Because he had constructed it, he was also able to fix it. By the end of the day, all the children had built their own cars.
I never bought them anything after that. Instead, I helped them search for old bottles or flip-flops they could use, or saved for them the toothpaste boxes. Those boxes were so popular that we had to set an order in which each child would receive his discarded box. They didn’t really do anything with them except keep them, to have something to call their own. The cars they made, or the bow and arrows they made out of bamboo, or the little Frisbees they made out of old flip-flop plastic—those things were all individual possessions. They happily shared them with others in Little Princes, but at the end of the day the toy or the piece of prized rubbish would go into their individual cardboard containers that were large enough to hold their two sets of clothes and everything else they owned in the world.
A man was leaving the orphanage.
I was a good distance away, walking back to the house after a hike into the hills, but I could see him well enough to know that I didn’t recognize him. That was unusual; we restricted the number of people who could enter the house for the protection of the children. As safe as the village felt, and as protective as the neighbors were of the children, we could not forget the civil war. We were situated on the southern border of the Kathmandu Valley. Just over the hills were villages under Maoist control. When soldiers in single file patrols came through the village searching houses for weapons, our neighbors convinced them to skip Little Princes Children’s Home so as not to disturb the children. To their credit, they always respected this.
Now, a strange man in the house made me nervous. I ran the rest of the way. Inside, I found Sandra and Farid speaking with Hari, the part-time house manager, who had just arrived from his other job over at CERV Nepal. They stopped when I came in, reading my concern. Sandra waved me to sit down with them.
“That man who just left,” she said, nodding out the door. “His name is Golkka.”
“Who is he? I thought we didn’t let strangers visit the children,” I said.
“He’s not a stranger. The children know him,” she said. Farid snorted derisively. Hari said nothing. I waited.
Sandra continued, “The children know him because he is the man who took the children from their villages. He is a child trafficker.”
Then, for the first time, I learned the story of how the children at Little Princes had arrived in the small village of Godawari.
Golkka, like the children, was from Humla, a district in the far northwest corner of Nepal, on the border of Tibet—the most remote part of an already remote country. It is completely mountainous, with no roads leading in or out. Most villages there have no electricity or phone service. There is a single airport; from there, the entire region is accessible only on foot or by helicopter. Many children growing up there have never seen a wheeled vehicle. It was in Humla, impoverished and vulnerable, that the Maoist rebels had created one of their first strongholds.
Golkka found that there was opportunity in such a place: he could have access to cheap child labor. He rounded up children orphaned by the civil conflict, a conflict that had thus far resulted in the deaths of more than ten thousand soldiers, rebels, and civilians. He forced the children to walk many days along narrow trails through the hills and mountains—trails that must have resembled the challenging paths up to Everest Base Camp. They walked until they reached a road, where they could catch a bus to Kathmandu. Once there, he kept them in a dilapidated mud house, offering them up for labor. If they wanted to eat, they were forced to beg on the streets.
When tourists discovered the children, they came to the house and asked what they could do to help. Golkka realized he had something much more lucrative on his hands than a mere workforce. He began bringing in volunteers to visit and care for the children. When they bought mattresses so the children would no longer have to sleep on the cold mud floors, Golkka thanked them, and then promptly sold the mattresses as soon as the volunteers left the country. Clothes brought for the children were similarly worn until volunteers left, then taken from the children and given to the trafficker’s family.
Sandra met these children while volunteering. She vowed to break the cycle of corruption. She raised money from France and offered to take the children off his hands. Golkka sensed another opportunity. He demanded payment, about three hundred dollars per child. This would be a small fortune in a country where the average annual salary was around two hundred and fifty dollars. Sandra refused to pay, but continued working with the government and other nonprofit organizations to secure the children’s release. Eventually, pressure from the Child Welfare Board and other organizations grew too much for him, and he let them go with her. Those eighteen children became the Little Princes.
Three months after the rescue, neighbors reported that Golkka’s crumbling home was filled again. He had gone back to Humla and gotten more orphaned children.
“Why wasn’t he arrested? Didn’t the Child Welfare Board know what he was doing?” I asked.
“They know. But Nepal’s laws are weak. He was the legal guardian of the children—he had found family members to sign custody to him. He could do almost anything he wanted with them,” said Sandra.
“So we can do . . . what, nothing?”
“You have to understand, Conor, this is very serious,” Sandra said, leaning forward. “We had a volunteer here four months ago. She tried to build a case against him with UNICEF and the Child Welfare Board. Golkka found out, and he came to the home and threatened physical violence against her and the children if she continued. She had to leave the country, for her safety and for the children’s safety.”
I didn’t say anything. I was out of my depth. I was only here for another month; this wasn’t my battle. But I found it difficult to control my anger against this man who seemed to be getting away with this, making a profit off the lives of the children. It wasn’t my fight, maybe, but I wanted to join it anyway. I read in Farid’s face a similar sentiment.
“What will happen to the children?” I asked.
“We keep them here, we raise them, and we educate them. They have no family to return to, or at least no family that we know of, except maybe distant relatives who may have signed them away, I suppose,” Sandra said sadly. “Many people—many family members—have been killed in this war.”
“But this guy, we have to let him in when he comes?”
“He’s not just any man,” Hari said, before Sandra could speak. “I know him well. His connections are powerful. He was arrested once, months ago, and he got out of jail after three days because his uncle is a politician. I d
o not want him here, but we cannot prevent him. He can take the children away from us.” He added, his voice apologetic, “It is Nepal. It is difficult.”
I went to see the children, up in their bedrooms. I was concerned that the visit from a man who had kept them as veritable slaves for two years had traumatized them. Incredibly, they were playing cards and jumping on their beds as if nothing had happened. These were the same kids who cried if they couldn’t find a flip-flop. It was my first glimpse into just how resilient these kids really were. Beneath the showing off, the sulking, the hilarity, there must be an imprint of the terrors they had lived through in Humla—the killings, the child abductions by the rebel army, the starvation. I imagined a steel lockbox at the center of each of them, inside of which they quarantined these memories so that they could live seminormal lives.
It suddenly became very important to me to tell them how much I cared about them. That if they ever needed anything, they could count on me—on us—no matter what. I was going to be a better parent to them, I told myself. That started with opening up to them.
That evening, I went into the bedroom where the older boys were about to go to sleep. I cleared my throat nervously, not sure how to say what I wanted to say.
“Hey boys—listen, you guys should know that I—that all of us—all the volunteers, we really care so much—”
“Conor Brother! What you eat in your country?” Santosh shouted. I had evidently walked into a debate. “You eat meat, yes? You eat animals?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I said, working to regain my train of thought. “You know, chicken, pig, that kind of stuff.”
“Goat?”
“Well, not really goat, no . . . more like sheep, cow—”
“Cow?!” Santosh sat up. He translated this for those who had missed it, eliciting gasps and one full shriek from Anish. It dawned on me that this might not be the kind of information I should be sharing with a room full of Hindu children.
“You eat cow?”
“Well, sometimes. You know, now that I think about it, it’s really more my friends who eat—”
“You eat God, Brother?” came an incredulous voice from the other side of the room.
“No, of course not, no, I would never . . . I mean, it’s not our God, you know, so—”
“Cow not God?!”
Yikes! “No, cow God! Cow God! It’s just that in America and Europe, we—”
“Why you eat?” demanded Santosh.
I was getting desperate. “Look, it’s not really God God, not in the way you’re thinking, not where I’m from, and you have never tried it so you have no idea how it tastes, it’s really popular, probably the most popular meat to—”
There was a thump as somebody’s jaw hit the floor, then silence. I took this as my chance.
“Okay, good night, boys! Sleep well!” I called, backpedaling quickly out the door, reaching my arm back inside to slap blindly at the wall until the lights went out, then closing the door behind me.
That could have gone better, I thought. I gave up on the idea of telling the kids anything. What they needed from me was to screw up as little as possible. They needed me to not tell them, right before they went to sleep, that my favorite food was their God on a bun. They needed me, for three months, to just make sure they were okay, fed, clothed, and bandaged up when need be. I was just a caretaker, but I needed to do that well. That would be a high enough bar for me without trying to change their world.
I never stayed away from the orphanage long. On occasion I would head into Kathmandu to meet up with other volunteers from my orientation program, have a beer, a yak steak and fries, and exchange stories from our volunteering gigs. I would tell them about village life; they would talk about life in the city. We tried to outdo one another with crazy stories. My favorite was the time my friend Alex Tattersall, an English guy from Manchester, volunteering in an orphanage in Kathmandu for troubled kids, had his camera stolen by one of the children. By the time he found out who it was, the boy had traded it for a chicken, which he had already killed, cooked, and eaten. The camera had cost five hundred dollars. Alex took a day to cool off, then he came right back to the orphanage, forgave the child, and continued taking care of the kids.
Other times, when the children were at school, I would go into Kathmandu to visit a simple, run-down artificial climbing wall, where one could practice rock climbing right in the city. The commute to the outdoor climbing wall took three hours, round-trip. There are no destinations written on the front of the local Kathmandu buses. One learns the route from the ten-year-old boy leaning out the open side door as the bus speeds along, looking for passengers, barking the final destination. Often the bus does not even come to a full stop. You are meant to run alongside it, grab a metal bar, swing onboard, then quickly cram your way into the horde of humanity already aboard. If it’s too crowded, you simply cling to the outside and hope cars don’t pass too closely. Sometimes an old lady would be waiting by the side of the road, as there are few official bus stops, and the boy would pound the side to indicate that the driver should slow enough to give the woman a fighting chance to swing herself aboard with the help of the boy.
I came to enjoy the commute. It was hypnotic, watching life on the Ring Road. It’s different in many ways from the center of Kathmandu, which is dominated by random alleyways lined with tiny shops just large enough for a man and his wares—carpets or plastic buckets or wool. The narrow streets expand into plazas built around Hindu temples, Buddhist stupas, and towering pagodas, giving pedestrians a breath of (relatively) fresh air, not to mention the opportunity to stand still for more than three seconds without getting hit by a bicycle.
The Ring Road is different. It’s not the claustrophobic labyrinth of Kathmandu but a postapocalyptic, tattered circle of pavement where buildings often sit forty or fifty feet back from the road, choked with vehicle exhaust. The faded yellow line dividing traffic is more of a suggested boundary; cars and motorcycles pull into the path of overladen trucks without hesitation, forcing oncoming traffic onto the dirt shoulder that could have been an extension of the road itself were it not for the clusters of pedestrians, cows, goats, stands selling plastic watch bands, and other stands selling bananas, and everything coated in dust and tinged with carbon monoxide.
Men and animals, side by side, rifle through large piles of garbage at the edge of the road. The people at this end of the economic scale are often dark-skinned. Complexion is important to social hierarchy in Nepal; it is not uncommon for a light-skinned Nepali to add a “Complexion” line to their résumé. It is a global phenomenon, this judgment of others by skin color, of course. But in Nepal, these men rummaging through the trash next to the Ring Road are undone by much more than just their skin tone. Their fate had been cemented at birth when they were born into the lowest caste of Nepalese society.
The caste system so dramatically displayed on the Ring Road is the formalized division of social stratification on the subcontinent. Even in Godawari, I often saw manifestations of the caste system. The larger, well-built mud homes typically belonged to the higher-caste residents, the Brahmins. Those belonging to other high-ranking castes often mentioned it without the slightest self-consciousness.
Even the local English-language newspaper adhered to the rigidity of the caste system. In place of weekend personal ads, they had what they called “matrimonials.” As the name suggested, men, and occasionally women, sought spouses. Men were seeking, invariably, an olive-skinned, “homely” woman from a good family. In the same way personal ads in America might be divided between men seeking women and men seeking men, matrimonial ads in Nepal are broken down by caste.
The Dalits are the lowest caste. From the window of my bus, I saw Dalits living on the side of the polluted Ring Road. They are unofficially banned from places we took for granted—barber shops, tea shops, and restaurants. So they set up a small mirror on the trunk of a
tree, place a wooden stool next to it, and this serves as a barber shop. I watched other men come around selling them glasses of dud chyiaa (milk tea) from a makeshift cup-holder. They created their own parallel lives, outside, among their own. It had been this way for their fathers and their fathers before that. But to me, it was infuriatingly unjust. I tried to accept Nepal exactly as it was; I told myself that cultures should be treated equally, that my own culture is terribly flawed and would appear even more so, I imagined, to outsiders. But I grew to despise the caste system during those long bus rides around the Ring Road, and that feeling has never left me.
One evening, after the children had gone to bed, Sandra told us that she would be leaving for a while. She was heading out of the Kathmandu Valley to go trekking near Rara Lake in a region called Mugu.
“Which is where, exactly?” asked Chris.
“Western Nepal. Rara Lake—it’s a trekking route, but nobody goes anymore because it is far from tourist routes, and because of the Maoists. But I found a guide who will take me!” She was giddy with excitement. Sandra was an avid hiker and mountain climber—this sounded like exactly her kind of adventure.
“And you’re not worried?” I asked.
“About what?”
“I don’t know—Maoists?”
I didn’t know much about the civil war, but what I did know worried me. In early 1996, the Maoist Party—an extreme Communist wing—had launched an insurgency. Their objective was to end the 250-year “feudal” rule of the monarchy. For the first several years, the uprising was considered a police matter—a series of scuffles in remote villages. But the rebel army expanded its ranks, first with men, then women, then children.