Authors: Conor Grennan
Little Princes (8 page)
That evening, I went into the boys’ bedroom to say good night to them for the last time. They had stopped bouncing around. They sat propped up, attentive, two to a bed, in the oversized second- and thirdhand T-shirts that served as their pajamas.
“When you come back, Conor Brother?” asked Anish, a question that seemed to vacuum all other sound out of the room. They wanted to hear my reply.
I was expecting that. We had been strongly advised by the CERV staff to be vague and conservative in our answers to this inevitable question. Few volunteers ever returned to Nepal; it was too far away and required too much time. Volunteering in an orphanage was a one-off, an experience that you would never forget and never repeat. The staff at CERV had learned it was better not to give the children false hope that volunteers would return, as it tended to deteriorate the trust given by the children to the next group of volunteers. The children were looked after by a constantly rotating set of parents, and they were becoming accustomed to it. The system was terribly flawed, but there were few alternatives.
“I’m not sure, Anish, but I’ll definitely try to get back!” I said, upbeat. This provoked no response from the boys.
“When, Brother?” Anish asked after an awkward silence.
“Well, definitely not for at least a year,” I told him. “Remember I told you guys that I’m going on that big trip? I showed you on the globe?”
“So after that, maybe, Brother?”
“Maybe!” I said. They had heard this before. Some of the boys looked away, others lay down in their beds. Anish alone remained sitting on the edge of his bed. He asked the question again in a different way, then again. He asked more specifically what I planned to do at the end of the year, and whether I needed to return home, and whether I liked Godawari. I finally cut him off. “I’m not really sure, Anish. But I’ll see you in the morning, okay, boys?”
“Okay, Brother,” came the chorus. Anish lay down. I switched off the light.
In my room, I pulled my backpack out from under my bed, and took a pile of T-shirts off a shelf, laying them flat in my bag. And I broke down. The emotion caught me off guard. I hadn’t cried in years, and I was really sobbing. I was happy in Godawari. But there’s nothing here, I told myself through jerking breaths. You eat rice every day. You never go out. You never meet any women. You have not seen a movie or TV in months. You have to take care of eighteen children. You are constantly dirty and always cold.
I imagined my mom at the airport, saying good-bye to me each time I returned to Prague after spending Christmas in America. She would cry into my shoulder, sobbing like I was right now. I had always wondered where that sadness came from; leaving had never seemed like a big deal to me. And now here it was, that same desperate sadness, filling this very room.
If walking into the responsibility of caring for eighteen children was difficult, walking out on that responsibility was almost impossible. The children had become a constant presence, little spinning tops that splattered joy on everyone they bumped into. I would miss that, of course. But the deeper sadness, the deluge of emotion, came from admitting that I was walking out on them. The children, as always, will be fine, Sandra had said. She could have said the same thing to my mom at the airport. I knew she was right. But I could not leave this house unsure whether or not I would ever return. I just wasn’t going to do it. Despite myself, I had become a parent to these kids—not because I was qualified, but because I had showed up.
I went back into the big boys’ room. They were talking quietly in the dark.
“Conor Brother!” I recognized Anish’s hoarse whisper. Dark shapes popped up in bed and whispered my name.
“Boys—I’ll come back in one year, okay?” I whispered.
“Okay, Brother!”
“Good night, boys.”
“Good night, Conor Brother!”
I left Little Princes with a traditional Nepali leaving ceremony. Farid had come back from the hospital for a few hours to see me off with the other volunteers. The children, one by one, placed a red tikka on my forehead, gave me flowers, and bade me a safe journey. As each of the eighteen children approached, each asked if it was true that I was coming back next year. I confirmed it again and again. Some of the volunteers looked skeptical. Farid only smiled.
I meant it. I would be back for them.
I
arrived in Bangkok on a warm night in mid-January 2005. My flight was almost empty of tourists. Just three weeks earlier, the tsunami watched around the world had shredded the west coast of Thailand, wiping hotels off picturesque beaches at the height of tourist season. I would be meeting up with Glenn Spicker, a close friend from my years living in Prague. (His nickname, Little Glenn, came from the fact he is only about five foot eight, though he packs more energy per square inch than a white dwarf star.) When the news broke about the tsunami’s devastation, we contemplated canceling our trip, but decided that the best thing we could do for the country would be to visit and spend money there.
I knocked on the door of Glenn’s hotel room. There was a scurry of activity from within, the door flew open, and there was Little Glenn, freshly showered, dressed in shorts and a black button-down, holding a can of Thai beer in each fist.
“Dude!” He put the beers down, gave me a bear hug, then picked them back up and handed me one. “Put your stuff down—we’re going out. Time to spend some money on this town—they need it bad. We’re in Bangkok, man! Can you believe that shi
—
Oh, and there’s a change of plan. We’re gonna buy mountain bikes and bike across South East Asia. Way cooler, and it’ll impress the hell out of chicks. I thought of that on the plane—it’s genius, right? You down with that?”
I dropped my stuff on one of the beds and took a long swig of beer, letting it seep through me.
“Bikes. Yes, that is definitely genius. We could . . . wait—are you serious?” I said, trying to remember the last time I had even ridden a bike.
“I never lie to you. Okay, this is awesome. Bikes it is—I’m serious. Are you ready? To go out? You need to brush your teeth or anything? The ladies are waiting, man! The real ladies, not the boys who dress up like ladies. I got your back, don’t worry. I know you’ve been out of the game for a while, that’s cool. You were saving orphans in Tibet. How was that? The orphanage? Was that crazy stuff, or what?”
“It was Nepal. And yeah, ‘crazy’ just about describes it,” I said, nodding.
“Crazy good or crazy bad?”
“Crazy good. Strange, huh?”
“I knew you had that in you. Awesome!” We stepped out and he went to lock his door. “But no more orphans now, right? We’re hanging out? We’re biking? We’re drinking and meeting women? This is your year, buddy. It begins now. Right, let’s rock this town . . . wait, my key. I gotta find my hotel key. Here, hold my beer.”
Glenn was serious about both the biking and the drinking. Two days later we purchased mountain bikes, jettisoned most of our stuff, and set off riding across Thailand. We rode several hours per day. It took us two or three days to get to towns that took most backpackers a few hours on a bus, but when we did get there we were rewarded with impressed stares from women when we told them how we had gotten there.
“I told you, man—I
told
you!” Glenn would shout across the bar at me.
We rode until we reached the northern border between Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), then turned right and rode until we got to Laos. That’s where the road ended.
“There’s no road? Anywhere around here?” Glenn was asking the woman in the tourist office. He was studying the map behind her head.
“No, sir, I am very sorry—the only road is back where you came, back into Thailand,” she said with an apologetic smile.
“Wait—what’s this? Is this a road?” He was pointing at a long purple line that bisected Laos.
“That is a river, sir. The Mekong.”
“Well . . . you got boats?”
Four hours later, our bicycles were strapped to the roof of a boat. We floated down the Mekong for two days until we reached the former capital of Laos, Luang Prabang, with its fading colonial homes and buzzing night markets. The road reappeared in Luang Prabang, and we took off again.
We pedaled our way up twelve-mile ascents, stopping to rest in jungle villages. Children ran to greet us and held on to us, our bikes, our legs, our saddlebags, studying us like fireflies they had caught in a jar. I would get off my bike and lie down in the grass and let the little ones pile on top of me, grabbing my face and touching my hair and untying my shoes. The older boys, those who reminded me of Anish and Santosh and the others, would sit a few feet away with wide grins, enjoying the scene but tinged by just enough self-consciousness not to join the pileup. I would sit with them too, unable to communicate. Glenn, having found some water in the village, would join us, talking to the kids as if they were old friends of his from Prague. The kids couldn’t stop giggling at him.
I
traveled to sixteen countries over the next nine months. After six weeks of biking with Glenn, I convinced Alex, my friend from Kathmandu who famously had his camera stolen and traded for a chicken, to catch up with me. He too was going around the world. When I told him what I was doing, he bought a mountain bike and met me in Cambodia. Three days later, we were biking south, sixty miles into a headwind, to the Cambodian coast. From there it was over the border into Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), which, according to the guidebook, had two million motorcycles ricocheting through its streets. I believed it. It felt like a dam had burst above a Kawasaki factory and we were caught in the floodwaters. But we escaped after a few days and some very late and drunken nights with our fellow backpackers, then it was north through the rice paddies and along the coast until we reached Hanoi.
I thought I would sell my bike when I returned to Bangkok, but it gave me such a sense of empowerment, not to mention detox after the nights of drinking, that I was unable to part with it. So when it was time to say good-bye to Alex and move on to Sri Lanka by myself, I packed up my bike and brought it with me. For three weeks I rode alone through the jungles of Sri Lanka, another country almost empty of tourists after the tsunami. After that, I cycled for a few days in Indonesia before giving up, throwing my bike onto a train, and coasting all the way to Bali, where I learned to surf from the young local boys giving lessons on the beach.
I finally gave up my bike in South America, where I hiked the Inca Trail with not just my old college buddies—Charlie, Steve, and Kelly—and their wives, but also with my brother and my mom. I flew into northern Peru and floated twelve hundred miles down the Amazon in a local boat, lying in a hammock packed in among the natives, eating the piranha they served twice a day plus (thank God) some granola bars, and watching the jungle pass by through sheets of rain.
I spent many days alone, but most of the time I was with other backpackers. In every country, backpackers were in vacation mode, travel mode, drinking mode, anything-goes mode. I bungee-jumped in Peru, became a licensed paragliding pilot in Bolivia, learned to windsurf in Vietnam, and rock-climbed in Thailand. I thwarted gangs attempting to mug me twice in the same day in Ecuador, got my camera snatched right out of my hand in Indonesia, got stitches in my calf in Vietnam, had X-rays taken of my knee in Singapore, and saw some of the world’s magnificent sights.
I found I had developed new feelings toward the children I saw begging on the street. Street children are common to every poor city, and I had always gone well out of my way to avoid them. I knew that they were working for somebody, that the begging was a scam. But since my experience in Nepal, for the first time, I saw them as normal children. Given a safe home, an opportunity to go to school, and people who could look out for them, they would be no different from the children at Little Princes. It made me miss Nepal and Little Princes all the more.
On a warm day in late October 2005, I walked off the plane at JFK Airport in New York, having completed my year-long round-the-world adventure. With almost no savings left, I stayed with my father and stepmother, both professors at Vassar College in New York, who had rented a beach house for the winter on Long Beach Island, a peaceful New Jersey coastal community, during their sabbatical. I needed a break after twelve months of nonstop travel, living out of a backpack. But within a couple of weeks, I found myself missing Nepal. In January 2006, almost exactly a year after I’d left Nepal, I landed back in Kathmandu for another three-month stint. I had just about run through my entire savings. It would be a nice way to officially end my travels before rejoining the working world.
T
he bus from Kathmandu to the village was crammed with the familiar smells of dust and sweat and spice. I was returning to a country that afforded me no personal space, that gave no thought to hygiene, that offered no decent food. My throat tightened as the minibus pulled into Godawari. I walked slowly down the path, past the wheat fields and mud houses where buffalo were staked to front porches, squeezing past the women coming back from the rice paddies, single file, eyes cast downward, carrying planet-sized loads of grass on their backs. What was I trying to prove? I had accomplished what I had set out to do the year before. I passed the last mud house on the right, where the path dipped and Little Princes Children’s Home came into view.
From a distance I saw the children playing on the rooftop terrace. One small figure stopped what he was doing and stared in my direction. Then, like a sailor spotting a whale, he pointed at me and waved his arms at the others, desperate to get their attention. Suddenly a mass of children were pointing at me, waving. From across the fields the wind carried “
Conorrrrr
!” in waves.
Wading through a sea of children once again—I remembered to take off my backpack this time—I discovered the only person above four feet tall was Farid. He had been here for the entire year.
“Welcome, Conor!” he called to me. “I think the children are very happy to see you!”
A wide smile spread across my face. I was happy to see them, too.
E
veryone had changed in the year I was gone. Sandra had returned to France. The other volunteers were long gone. Farid had buzzed off his long dreadlocks, and his English had improved, which was good because my French had not. Santosh, who had sprouted a full two inches since I’d last seen him, took my bag and carried it up to my room, commenting all the way how weak I looked and how thankful I must be that I had such a strong man to carry my stuff. I tipped him with an empty gum wrapper when he held out his hand with mock expectation.
But the place itself was just as I had left it. I sat down on my old bed, on the same thin straw mattress, my sleeping bag rolled up under the bed, right where I had left it. Even the weather was the same. I knew exactly what would happen when I walked out the door. I knew these eighteen children like I knew my own brothers. I relaxed. Godawari was home.
My first full day back in Nepal coincided with a Hindu festival. The festivals were a reminder that just when you thought you were as far from your normal life as possible, there is always a little bit farther you could go. I had experienced Hindu festivals before, more or less by accident. In the small town of Pushkar, India, I collided with a celebration for some unknown holiday. My memory of it was little more than a blaze of colors and flowers and music. I had been pulled into a group of large, middle-aged sari-clad ladies who begged me to dance with them, right there on the street, a crowd gathering around us.
That morning in Godawari, I woke in a haze of jetlag. Through blurred vision, I saw an eye peeking through the inch-wide opening at my door. I raised my head slowly off the pillow, and the eye disappeared, quickly replaced by a small mouth, lips pushing their way through the crack.
“Brother! Brother!” yelled the lips. “Festival today, Brother!” It was Raju’s voice.
For a moment I couldn’t even figure out where I was or why somebody was yelling at me.
Raju repeated himself at full-throated yell until I was fully awake.
“Okay, Raju . . . okay, I’m up. What festival?”
He paused, and the bemused sliver of his face showed that the question had caught him off guard. He disappeared for a second and I heard him whispering with somebody, and heard the reply, which could only be Nuraj—his distinctively gruff voice made him sound like he had a perpetual cold. Raju’s lips reappeared in the crack.
“I don’t know, Brother!” he shouted.
None of the kids knew. It was simply “Festival!” and that meant extra food. I had been looking forward to my first daal bhat, but instead found some kind of pale brown vegetable-ish object on my plate. I took a sniff. It was almost completely odorless, which made me trust it even less. I watched as the semicircle of children gobbled theirs up. I glanced at Farid.
“What is this?”
“I do not know. I do not want to know,” he declared, pushing it farther away from him.
“Hey, guys,” I said loudly to the sixteen boys and two girls sitting around me. Everybody froze. I forgot that meal times were a time to focus on getting food from the plate into one’s mouth, not a time for talking. The children stared, waiting for whatever urgent news I was about to deliver.
“What is this thing? This food you’re eating?” I asked.
My question set off a flurry of discussion among them. They knew the name in their own language, but had no idea what it was called in English. The big boys were discussing possible translations, but one by one they fell completely silent. They all looked to Santosh. Santosh’s eyes searched the ceiling for an answer. Everyone held their breath in anticipation.
Suddenly Santosh leaped to his feet, sending his plate skidding across the floor, and he jabbed an index finger skyward in a Eureka-type gesture.
“Kind of
potato,
Brother!”
Euphoric cries filled the room. “Yes! Yes! Potato!” shouted Anish. Hriteek’s hands shot out toward me, imploringly. “Potato, Brother! Kind of potato!” he cried.
I looked down at my plate. I’ve seen potatoes. I’m half Irish—I’ve eaten hundreds of potatoes in my life. My friends, this was no potato. This was not even a kind of potato, as the children were suggesting. It may have been some kind of root vegetable, based on how ugly it was; like those animals that live on the ocean floor, where it’s so dark that looks don’t matter. But it didn’t belong on my plate, and it sure as hell wasn’t going in my mouth.