book pick
A quest that
scaled mountains
How volunteering changed one man
By Will Fifield
SEEING, THEY SAY, is believing. Little Princes, by
Conor Grennan, is eye-opening. It describes the stark
reality faced by thousands of children in Katmandu,
the capital of Nepal. Grennan writes, often surpris-
ingly humorously, about his experience working as a
volunteer at Little Princes—an orphan-
age in the region—and how it trans-
formed him from an “average, ordinary
“I didn’t really know what I was getting into,”
Grennan says in a recent interview with The
Connection from his home in Connecticut. “But little
by little, I was hooked. At some point I realized that
I had become a parent. I took the children to the
MAYBE YOU can’t judge
a book by its cover. But
what about judging a book
by its author? If that’s fair
game, then I’ve got a gem
for you: Conor Grennan’s
hospital, picked up their report cards
from school and generally cared for
them, because they didn’t have anyone
else to do these things for them.”
Little Princes.
American guy” to a man who has risked
life and limb to help stranded Nepalese
children reconnect with their families.
In 2004, when Grennan first visited
Nepal, Maoist guerrillas had been at
war for eight years with the royal family
who ruled the region. Grennan, then
28, had been working for nonprofits,
such as the East West Institute in Prague,
since he graduated from college. He decided to
take a year off to travel around the world. Working
as a volunteer along the way would, he thought,
enrich his adventure. Little Princes, a French-run
orphanage just south of Katmandu, welcomed his
offer of help.
MORRIS J. KENNEDY
In this memoir, Grennan
tells how volunteering at
an orphanage in Nepal
was only part of his plan to
travel the world for a year—
and if he collected stories
that would impress women
over a drink at a bar, all
the better.
Conor Grennan
“The brochures for volunteering in Nepal said
civil war,” Grennan writes. “Being an American, I
assumed the brochure writers were doing what I did
all the time—exaggerating. No organization was
going to send volunteers into a conflict zone.”
The stark reality of the children’s
war-torn existence was a difficult
adjustment for Grennan, but the
severity of their plight, he eventually
discovered, was much deeper. During
the years of civil war, rebels had kid-
napped children from remote villages
to train them as soldiers. Frightened
parents would pay traffickers posing as concerned
guardians to take their children to Katmandu and
enroll them in school. The traffickers took the
money but abandoned the children in the city,
where they often wound up conscripted into hard
labor, or worse. The lucky ones were taken in at
orphanages, such as Little Princes. The predicament
motivated Grennan to try something no one else
had attempted.
“I realized that, if I was going to give these kids
a future, I had to find their parents,” he says. “People
said, ‘Great, how are you going to find them?’ I said,
‘Go into the mountains and look.’ Then people
would say, ‘Well, don’t you understand that you’d
have to walk for a week just to get there?’ The task
was both incredibly difficult and very straightforward. There was no shortcut I could find.”
After I met Grennan not
too long ago, it’s hard for
me to imagine that he ever
set out to do anything but
reunite these children with
their families. He makes it
look easy to speak with 100
percent passion while maintaining an unassuming
attitude about all he’s done.
It turns out there was no hyperbole in the
brochure. On his way to the orphanage, Grennan
encountered machine-gun-wielding guards,
endured checkpoints on and off the buses he rode
and saw machine-gun nests at many intersections
in Katmandu.
Quite simply, Grennan
is about as real as a person
can get. And this book is a
testament to the capacity to
do good that, one can only
hope, stirs inside all of us.
Signed book giveaway
In 2006 Grennan founded Next Generation
Nepal (
www.nextgenerationnepal.org), an orphanage modeled after Little Princes, and headed into
the mountains with case files and photos of 24 children. Three strenuous weeks of trekking paid off:
He found the families of all 24 children. This part of
the story reads like a good action novel.
For more book picks,
see page 71.
“I hope people take away two things from
this book,” says Grennan. “First, that, regardless
of their culture or environment, children are children. These kids are just like the kids you see
wherever you live. Just as fun, just as goofy. I
hope people support Next Generation Nepal,
but this, I feel, is important. Second, anybody can do this stuff. I have read Three
FRANCE FREEMAN
Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. I am
astonished by Mortenson. He’s one of
my personal heroes, but this is not
that kind of story. I did what anyone
who unwittingly found themselves in the
same situation would do.” C
Pennie Clark Ianniciello,
Costco book buyer
COSTCO HAS 50 SIGNED COPIES of Conor
Grennan’s Little Princes to give away. For a
chance to win, send an e-mail with your
name and mailing address to giveaway@
costco.com, with “Conor Grennan” in the
subject line. Or print your name, address
and daytime phone number on a postcard
or letter and send it to: Conor Grennan,
The Costco Connection, P.O. Box 34088,
Seattle, WA 98124-1088.
NO PURCHASE OR PAYMENT OF ANY KIND IS
NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN THIS SWEEPSTAKES.
Purchase will not improve odds of winning. S weepstakes is sponsored
by Harper Collins, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY, 10022. Open to legal
residents of the U.S. (except Puerto Rico) who are age 18 or older at
the time of entry. One entry per household. Entries must be received by
March 1, 2011. Winners will be randomly selected and noti;ed by mail on
or before April 1, 2011. The value of the prize is $25.99. Void where prohibited. Winners are responsible for all applicable federal, state and local
taxes. Odds of winning depend on the number of eligible entries received.
Employees of Costco or HarperCollins and their families are not eligible.
