Gyan shook his head. “There are more than two hundred.”
“And our kids could be in any one of them, or they could be somewhere completely different. We are never going to find them, Gyan.” It was the first time I had said this out loud, and the truth of it struck me. It made me ill. I didn’t know what I was doing, and it seemed nobody could help.
Gyan stared at me for a moment, then walked back to his desk. That was my signal to leave. I wasn’t even angry anymore; I just felt slightly dizzy, like walking away from a car accident. This was all a charade. Everything I had said I could do could not be done. The children were gone. That was life in Nepal. This packed room of distressed parents told that story every single day.
Gyan reached his desk and put down the papers he was holding. Then he took his jacket off a hook behind his chair, said something to his colleague, and walked back to me.
“Follow me,” he said, and he walked out of his office, down the stairs, and into the heavy rain. I hurried after him and shouted over the rain.
“Where are we going? Gyan?”
Gyan kept walking until we reached his motorcycle. He climbed on, and handed me the spare helmet.
“We’re going to look for your seven children,” he said, kicking the motorcycle to life. “Get on. And hold tight—roads are very slippery.”
The rain hit my helmet like falling acorns. We muscled through it, down narrow alleys in areas of Kathmandu I had never seen. After thirty minutes of dodging traffic and spitting caked mud from our tires, Gyan pulled over. In front of us was the gate of a house that appeared typical of its neighborhood in every way. Gyan dismounted, took off his helmet, and walked to the gate and started pounding on it. By the time I had joined him, the gate was cracked open; a woman peeked out to see who it was. Her eyes widened as she recognized Gyan. She spoke quickly, but Gyan’s voice rose and drowned her out. I had never seen him like this—threatening. She gave a weak response. Gyan glared. She reluctantly opened the gate and stepped back, eyeing me warily.
I followed Gyan through another narrow passage. We stopped in front of an old wooden door, paint peeling off it like dead bark. Gyan turned to the woman and instructed her to go back to the front gate and wait there. She protested. Gyan said nothing, he just stared at her. The woman mumbled under her breath and went back the way we had come in.
Gyan slowly pushed open the door. It was dark. A moldy smell washed over us as we stepped carefully inside. Several seconds passed as my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. At first, it looked to be an empty room. Then shapes began to distinguish themselves. A long wooden table stood in the middle of a concrete floor, bunk beds lined the walls. The only other light came from the narrow gap between the concrete walls and the tin roof. The air was as thick as the inside of a coffin. I could hear my own breathing.
Beside me, Gyan spoke in a low, gentle voice. After a long minute, I heard rustling from the dark corners of the room. He kept speaking. Then a shape appeared, dimly lit by the light from the doorway. It was a child. He must have been seven or eight years old, but he was dangerously thin and was clutching a handful of rice. Gyan squatted next to him and spoke to him. His voice was healing, even to me. The boy whispered something. Gyan smiled and continued talking to him. Then the boy turned his head and spoke, louder this time, back into the darkness. Soon more children were coming out, boys and girls. Most were bald, their heads clumsily shaven to banish lice. They stood in a group, arms and shoulders touching. There were more than thirty of them.
“Conor sir—you see any of your children here?”
I couldn’t move. The children were staring at me, unsure what I was doing here, unsure whether this was a good thing or yet another bad thing. My hand shook as I took out the photo of the seven that I had kept from nine months earlier, and looked from face to face. None of the children looked familiar.
“No, they’re not here,” I said.
“Okay. Then we must go,” he said, putting his helmet back on his head.
“Wait, what about these—are you just going to leave these kids here? They’re starving!”
Gyan took off his helmet. “I can see that, Conor sir. What would you like me to do?” he asked.
“Take them with us, put them in a home!”
“Which home, Conor sir? Your home?”
“I don’t have a home yet, Gyan, you know that. I mean a government home,” I said.
“We do not have a home, either, Conor sir, not one with room. Nobody has homes for these children,” he said. I could see him clearly in the darkness now. He was staring at me, as if waiting for something to dawn on me. “I know this is difficult. This is not like your country. We do not have solutions as you do.”
I said nothing. I just stared at the children. “So we are going to leave them here? With this woman? With so little food, living in this hole?”
“This is Nepal, Conor sir. There are thousands of children like this. But now we must continue to search for your seven children. We cannot give them up, no?”
“No, we cannot give them up.”
“Then we must go. I hope I may come back for them. But this woman knows I am watching her. She will not let them expire. This visit has scared her. The children will eat better tonight, trust me.”
Leaving that house was one of the most difficult things I’d ever had to do in my life.
Gyan and I sped through more alleys, visiting more of those terrible places, searching for a needle in a haystack. We saw a hundred children, at least, in the next few hours. All of them were in the same condition. In each room we stood, raincoats dripping water onto the floor, and I showed the photos over and over, thoughtlessly. I was no longer looking for the seven children—they were in front of me. The children in these rooms were the ones I hadn’t found, the ones I hadn’t lost. They were never even blips on the radar.
Then, in one room, excited chatter. I was holding the photo up to a group of older boys, and they pointed and spoke quickly, first among one another, then to Gyan. Gyan took the photo from me, and pointed at four of the boys, confirming. A boy wearing a long, dirty white T-shirt, torn across the back, nodded and pointed as well. I looked closer. He had pointed at Navin, Madan, Samir, and Dirgha.
“What did he say?” I asked.
Gyan questioned the boy one more time, and the boy nodded again. Gyan stood up. “These four boys were here, maybe three weeks ago. They are not here anymore,” he said. Anticipating my next question, he said, “They do not know where they went. A man took them away again.”
“What about the other three children? Have they seen Amita, the girl? Or Bishnu? He is the young one, the small boy—was he here?” I addressed the boy.
“Only these four, Conor sir. The others were not here.”
Golkka had split the children up.
I returned to Little Princes. I had to work. Fund-raising, I soon learned, is an exhausting and interminable process. It involved writing to everybody I knew, keeping them updated on my progress even when there was none, asking friends and contacts to put me in touch with their friends and their contacts. Asking people for favors, again and again and again.
I had a laptop with me; we had a weak Internet connection via modem that worked on and off. I went into the small office in the home and sat down at the desk to work.
My laptop was missing.
My palms were against my forehead. I spun around, scanning the room. None of my work was possible without it. On it were all my notes, my documents, my e-mails, my database of names. I felt the panic rising in my chest, slowly sealing off my throat. It’s okay, I thought, taking deep breaths through my nose. One of the children might know where it is.
I went upstairs. No children. No children in the bedroom either. I came back down, and where the living room had been silent moments earlier, it was now loud with cheers. I walked in to find twenty children gathered around my laptop, wat
ching a terrible-quality, horribly sound-tracked, out-of-focus Bollywood movie on DVD. The cheering had erupted when the hero—a hairy, leather-clad fellow carefully bleeding from his left cheek—leaped off a roof and into a circle of villains who appeared to be taunting a distraught young woman.
“Where did you guys get this movie?” I asked the group at large.
Anish spun around, agitated to the point of almost shaking. I suddenly felt bad; I hadn’t meant to get them in trouble. They just wanted to borrow the computer. Anish opened his mouth to apologize.
“Brother, no talk! Please, Brother! Hero fight! Hero fight!!” he cried breathlessly, pointing at the screen and spun back around.
On screen, the villains were laughing that odd, fake laugh that exists only in movies to show just how ridiculous it is that one man is about to fight twelve. The camera zoomed in on the hero’s face, the side with the manicured gash. He tore off his sunglasses and, staring at the main villain, growled “Yabba dabba dabba!” (I don’t speak Hindi). He flew through the air, and sank his fist, elbow-deep, into the ribs of one of the bad guys. The kids went berserk.
“Listen, guys—I’m serious, I really need my computer, so if one of you guys can unplug it—” I was cut off by another eruption from the children as the hero flew back the other way now, from right to left, foot first this time. He appeared not to need to touch the ground. The camera caught a shot of his heel entering the mouth of another bad guy, who suddenly didn’t think everything was so fake-funny. The children were almost levitating in their euphoria. Nuraj leaped up and launched into a spontaneous dance.
Hari was standing on the other side of the room, arms folded, staring at the small screen.
“Hari, where did they get this?”
“Friend from school give, Brother. It is Bollywood movie, on DVD. You like?”
“I’m not sure, I just got here—how long are these things?”
Hari considered this. “I will guess this movie . . . four hour long?”
Four hours? Of this?
“When did they start it?”
“Ten minute ago, Brother,” he said.
I looked at my watch. I couldn’t really do much without my computer. Another squeal of delight rose from the masses. What the hell, I thought. I sat down to watch, just as the screen filled with two villain heads being knocked together by disembodied hands. The crowd went wild.
At the end of September, I received an e-mail that caught my attention. It came from a fellow University of Virginia graduate, albeit from the law school, whereas I had been an undergraduate there. Her name was Liz Flanagan. She had discovered NGN through the article in the Charlottesville newspaper and had written to ask me more about it. In all the e-mails I had received by people saying they hoped to one day also have the opportunity to work with impoverished children, Liz’s was the first that talked about what she had already done and why she wanted to continue doing it. She was writing because she was traveling to India at Christmas to volunteer, and she wanted to know if Next Generation Nepal was perhaps affiliated with a global organization that I could recommend.
I wrote back the same day. I explained that we were an independent organization, but that I would be happy to help her if I could. I asked her where else she had volunteered.
“In Zambia, at an orphanage out there,” she wrote. “It seems like you were a natural with kids from day one—I didn’t have that at all! When I first showed up to the orphanage, I tried to be sensitive to their needs and show them as much affection as possible, but mostly they seemed to want me to chase them. I couldn’t get them to calm down, so finally I gave up and chased them for about nine days straight. Sometimes they slowed down and I could talk to them and get to know them a bit. I also made up songs about them. . . . Come to think of it, I’m not sure what my value added was. I’m sure they’re still talking about that strange white girl from America.”
It was nice to know that somebody had been as clueless as I had been in those first moments with children, even if she didn’t know it. I also liked that she was willing to admit how tough it had been working with children at first. I told her about the first day I walked into Little Princes.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” I wrote, after describing my entry into the children’s home, when I couldn’t get the kids to stop jumping on me. “I think mostly I was trying to mask my fear of taking care of kids.”
“Yeah, that sounds familiar. But I bet the kids loved piling up on you. Maybe sometimes that’s all they need?”
In our next e-mail exchange, I learned that Liz was an attorney and had been practicing corporate law at a large New York City firm for several years. Then, two years earlier, she decided to take off with her best friend, Elena, in 2004 for three months of traveling around the world before taking a new job as the in-house counsel at a technology company. She had been struck by the same desire I’d had that very same year, when I planned my world trip: the need to see what else was out there.
On Easter morning 2004, in the small town of Hoi An, Vietnam, after another long night out with her fellow backpackers, Liz decided to take a walk. In the quiet streets, she came upon a young boy, perhaps eight years old, who was severely physically handicapped. Something about him caused her to stop and sit with him for a while, though he didn’t speak a word of English. The boy, clearly enamored, took Liz’s hand and led her down the street and to his home: an orphanage for handicapped children in the back alleys of Hoi An. Something was sparked in her. The next summer she volunteered in Zambia with HIV kids, and then on to South Africa. This Christmas she was going to India.
“So you’re a born traveler,” I observed.
“Actually, I’m the exact opposite of a born traveler,” she wrote back. She told me that, when she was twenty-two, she moved to England with her then fiancé. She barely left her room for the first week. “The accents scared me. The buses and Underground scared me. The food scared me—it actually scared me. I couldn’t figure out why they were putting sweet corn on pizza. Who does that? I made my fiancé buy only food that was readily available in the States. I hated it, I just wanted to go home. And that was England.”
I liked Liz immediately.
Early one morning in October, the phone rang. It was Anna Howe. She had heard a rumor less than an hour earlier, something I needed to know immediately.
Since our long conversations over the summer, when she told me everything she knew about Humla, about her experiences, Anna and I had remained close. She was about the same age as my own mother, and she became just as protective. A few days after I arrived in Nepal, we met up at the local tea shop. It would become the first of a regular series of meetings, sitting at a café and discussing strategies for getting me safely into—and out of—Humla. We discussed the safest route, the safest time to travel, who I could meet there.
In our third meeting, Anna appeared especially excited. A Humli man named D.B., a colleague and old friend of hers, had agreed to travel to Humla on behalf of ISIS, the international organization Anna worked for in Kathmandu. ISIS was also taking care of children from Humla. Anna suggested that D.B. and I travel together, to see if we could help each other find the families of the children in those remote villages. She introduced us. That introduction, in D.B.’s living room, with Buddhist icons lining the walls, sitting Indian style on traditional Nepalese carpets, was a turning point. A mission to Humla was suddenly looking, if not easy, at least possible. D.B. and I began formulating a plan to travel to Humla together, putting our two teams together.
On that October morning, Anna said she had urgent news. She had heard that some children from Humla had recently appeared in Thangkot, a village in the western Kathmandu Valley. I knew the place—Golkka and his trafficking ring used it as a home base. I had gone two weeks earlier by myself to visit the illegal children’s homes that I knew about. There were dozens of children from Humla, but none of the
seven were among them. I told Anna as much.
“It is worth investigating again, Conor,” she said. “Most of the new children in the village are too old to match the descriptions of the children you are looking for. But there was one that did: a little girl, with long black hair and Tibetan features, maybe seven or eight years old. Nobody had ever seen her before. You said you were looking for a girl like that, didn’t you?”
I can’t remember even hanging up the phone. Within minutes I was out the door and on a minibus, the first in a series of long bus rides that would take me to Thangkot. If Amita—if it was indeed her—was there, there was no telling how long she would be there. Golkka had moved her at least once, and there was no way of knowing how often he was moving the children. Time was short. Unfortunately, it was a bad time for trying to get anywhere quickly. It was Dasain.
Dasain is the most important Hindu festival of the year in Nepal. I could never quite figure out what it was all about. What I did know was that at Dasain, the Ring Road on the western side of Kathmandu was almost impassable, thanks to a massive goat market that popped up seemingly overnight. Goats played a critical role in Dasain. Per tradition, each family, even the poorest, would slaughter a goat for the festival. Before eating that goat, the family would spray its blood on their cars, motorcycles, and, yes, buses, as a puja, or blessing. It was a sign of my growing comfort with Nepal that as I boarded a blood-splattered bus, all I could think was how bad the traffic was going to be.
To avoid the congestion on the Ring Road, our minibus took an unusual route. We weaved our way through the mazelike back alleys of the capital that seemed designed for nothing wider than fat donkeys. At times, both sides of the bus literally scraped both walls; if we got stuck we would have to kick out the front windshield to escape. Once back on the main road, our driver continued his practice of getting to our destination by any means necessary, first driving on the dirt shoulder and, when that got clogged up, driving on the shoulder of the oncoming traffic, honking madly at pedestrians. It was a bold move even in Kathmandu. But it also got me to Thangkot by late morning.
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