Little Princes - Softcover

Funny, touching, tragic. Conor Grennan's Little Princes is a remarkable tale of corruption, child trafficking and civil war in a far away land and one man s extraordinary quest to reunite lost Nepalese children with their parents. (Neil White, author of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts)

About to turn thirty, Conor Grennan planned a year-long trip around the world. He started his trip with a three-month stint volunteering in the Little Princes Orphanage in war-torn Nepal. What was supposed to be just a three-month experience changed Conor's life, and the lives of countless others.

While playing on the roof of the orphanage, Conor was approached by a woman who would turn out to be the mother of two of the wards. Over hours of conversations with her, Conor learned the truth about the kids he'd come to love. Many of the little princes were not orphans but rather had been taken from their homes and families by child traffickers. In addition to losing two of her boys, this woman, while under the control of a human trafficker, was doing her best to keep seven other terrified kids alive in her mud hut. Conor's life changed in those moments, as he decided to commit himself to these kids, regularly traveling three hours by bus to take them food. After securing spots in an orphanage for all seven and arranging for an excellent local staff to run the Little Princes orphanage, Conor escaped Nepal, one day before revolution erupted in Kathmandu, with the King's police shooting protestors in the streets.

After arriving home, Conor received a devastating email reporting that the seven kids had disappeared, snatched once again by the same trafficker. Soon he was back in Kathmandu, riding through the chaotic streets on the back of a local's motorcycle, searching for his kids, seven needles in a corrupt haystack. And that is where Conor's story begins.

Conor pledged to not only start a new orphanage for these seven but to start an entire new program dedicated to reuniting kids with their lost families in remote villages in the Nepalese hills, a four-day walk at best through war-torn precincts with no roads. He lived under constant fear of retribution from the traffickers, confronted drunken Maoist soldiers in the dark of night, and walked for four weeks on an injured leg with little and sometimes no food, waiting to be rescued by a World Food Organization helicopter that never arrived. He made a four-day walk in two days-moving through the dangerous night-to catch a flight from a remote spot before the snows of December arrived. He needed to return by December 22nd, both because that was the agreed-upon panic date on which friends would alert authorities if he didn't return, and because it was the date that the woman he'd fallen in love with over email would arrive at his door so they could, at long last, meet in person.

Conor's team has reconnected almost 300 families with children they feared were lost to them forever.