Little Princes by Conor Grennan

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Little Princes
by Conor Grennan
(Audio)

I don't read a lot of memoir. I like fiction so much more than real life :-) But sometimes I'll read something like this book and wonder why I don't real more things like this book.

Conor, after graduating from UVA (something I don't hold against him, really), decides it will be impressive if he goes to Nepal to look after orphans for a few weeks in a program. He knows it won't be a walk in the park, but he's somewhat unprepared mentally. There seem to be two major stumbling blocks right off the bat: he's spending two weeks in a country with a culture far different from his and he's meant to take care of kids and he's got no experience working with kids. Conor doesn't make fun of himself, but he is honest about how over his head the whole thing was from the start and about what (usually humorous) mistakes he makes at the beginning.

He soon falls in love with both the culture and the kids. And the reader gets to know the boys at Little Princes orphanage quite well through his descriptions of them. Some aren't even orphans, we realize, they're children who have been sold to child traffickers by their families, under the promise that the children will get good food and education and a job so money can be sent back home (and then, far from their villages, the child traffickers just dump them in the middle of nowhere or in the big city and keep the profits).

There are organizations that are trying to stop this practice and help the children, but the problem is so large and widespread and the families genuinely think they're doing the right thing for their kids, even if they love and miss their children every moment after they do it. So when Conor comes across a group of children who have been traficked, he tries to help, only to find that they've been moved before he can get an organization to move on their behalf.

Devistated, Conor returns home and sets up "Next Generation Nepal," a non-profit that would eventually set up a group home with beds for orphans in Nepal. But the group's first focus, and his, is to find the missing children he feels he broke a promise to.

The most amazing and emotional part of the book takes place when Conor treks for weeks (months?) into remote villages of Nepal to search for the families of the orphaned children. The families don't realize that the child trafficker lied to them and the children had been told their families were all dead. He's able to actually bring the families proof that their sons/daughters are safe and the children proof that their families are alive. But he manages this with hardship and at great personal expense.

I must admit, the Christianity that popped up near the end of the book, is not my thing (even though I adored hearing about how he met Liz, his future wife). But he's able to make even that sit well with me. Farid, another man who works in the orphanage with him, finds answers in Buddhism (I hope I'm remembering that correctly), just as Conor finds it in Christianity.

Little Princes is this year's All Fairfax Reads book. So people all over the county are being encouraged to read it. The author will be speaking at the Fall for the Book Festival in September 2011, and I'm excited to go hear him speak in person. I loved the audio, because he read it himself and he did a marvelous job with all the accents (even the Scottish one). He really made me feel like I was inside his head, going on this journey with him. And he was able to show me a world I didn't realize existed. So I loved it in audio... but I also found the actual book in the library so I could see the photos of the places & people (especially the children, who now have a place in my heart).