I walked back inside to find Jacky lighting a cigarette. We stared at each other for a second, and both burst out laughing.
“You know the mayor of Kathmandu?” I asked, collapsing onto a chair. “Are you serious?”
“Bien sûr—we rescue many children, Conor. The mayor approves of what we do here,” he said with a smile. “He gave me his card some months ago. But I admit, this was the first time I had called him. I am surprised he picked up. But very happy. It was a very good decision, I think, no?”
I just shook my head in wonder. Jacky had guts. Later that evening, we would learn from Gyan, who already knew what had happened, that the mayor had threatened to call the chief of police and send every single policeman in Kathmandu to descend upon that office if the bank manager did not leave immediately.
I had no more doubts. We had gambled by taking the boy, but the man’s decision to quickly flee convinced me that he had been keeping Bishnu as a servant, nothing more. Bishnu was safe at last.
I walked outside toward where Bishnu was sitting in the field, building a small house with Dirgha and Amita. Bishnu had watched the man leave, yet had not gotten up, had not even reacted. He turned back to his old friends from that shack on the Ring Road and continued building the house. Bishnu never spoke of him again—further evidence that he had been a servant and nothing more.
Farid was watching them from a short distance away. I walked over to him, and he heard me come up.
“I don’t think that was very easy, no? I could hear you shouting from outside,” he said.
“No, not so easy,” I said.
We watched the kids try to balance a roof of heavy twigs over the tiny stone walls they had just built.
“We have all seven children,” Farid said, trying the words out, slowly, as if trying to convince himself it was really true. “Who would have believed this? You?”
“I didn’t know,” I said, truthfully. “I guess I didn’t really believe it, no.”
“I didn’t either,” he admitted. “I hoped, but I thought it might be impossible.”
I considered that. “You know who believed it?” I said to him. He shook his head. “The only person who believed this was going to happen was Liz. She kept telling me over and over.”
Farid smiled and turned back in time to see the little house crumble under the weight of the twigs.
Seven
Liz and I continued writing, often up to twenty times a day. I wasn’t the only one interested in Liz’s life; the Dhaulagiri girls were thrilled that I was able to bring them daily news about her. They asked about her two or three times a day, always with a sly insinuation that we were more than just friends. It became their favorite topic. I assured them, in what I felt was a reasonably good lie, that of course we were just friends; otherwise we would be married. For a young Nepali girl from the village, this was airtight logic. You were unlikely to have even met your husband before your arranged marriage to him, let alone have dated him.
“Then you want to marry Liz Sister, yes Conor dai?” they crowed.
“Friends, girls. We’re just friends. You can ask Liz!” I said. Then I would quickly e-mail Liz and remind her to tell the kids that we were just friends when she wrote to them. The children loved it when she e-mailed them; they would scour her letters for clues that would give away our budding romance.
“Yes, Conor, I remember it from when you reminded me two days ago. And when you reminded me the day before that, and the day before that.”
The Little Princes, well, they were a different story. They knew me too well; I couldn’t keep anything from them if I tried. I tested out the same line on them, and the boys laughed as if I had just told them the single greatest joke in Nepalese history.
“Brother, your lie very terrible! We have seen many American movies now. We know not much arranged marriage in your country,” Santosh said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “We meet Liz on her visit. She very very beautiful. You very love her, Brother! You love her!”
I denied it vigorously. But the fact was, from the moment Liz left Kathmandu in January, I had been working to get her back. I went about it cautiously, being sensitive to the fact that she would have to take a week off work, buy a ticket, and fly halfway around the world. So I dropped small hints, telling her all the things that were happening with the girls, how much everybody missed her, how much warmer the weather was getting now that it was March. She responded cheerfully, but never came out and said she would come.
I had confided in Viva about the issue a couple of days earlier. Viva was like family, a cross between a mom and a big sister. She knew I was crazy about Liz, she had seen it when we all met for tea on several occasions in January. I asked Viva what she thought might be going on in Liz’s head.
“Conor, it constantly amazes me how dumb men can be,” she said in her Northern Irish brogue as she put down her tea. “For God’s sake, tell her you want her to visit. Women want to be pursued, not have their feelings danced around. You want her to come? Be a man. Better yet, be a French man—right, Jacky?”
“Ah oui,” Jacky murmured, taking a drag off his cigarette.
“Ask her to come. Demand it, from your heart. My God, how do you not know this stuff?”
So I did. I told her in my next e-mail that I would love it if she came to visit me. That I knew it was a long way to come and expensive and everything else, but that I really wanted to see her. The next day, she told me she had gotten the e-mail and started to check flights. I didn’t let her off the hook until she had committed to a time: mid-April. She wrote that she would love to come then. Good old Viva.
I went over to Dhaulagiri to tell Farid the good news. As I was leaving, I ran into Leena in the foyer, alone as usual, staring out the front door. She was wearing her woolen maroon hat. The house maintained its chill with remarkable efficiency, regardless of the temperature outside. The hat was clearly too big for her; it was difficult to get clothes donated that fit the children exactly right. This particular hat, though, stuck up well off the top of her head. The elastic in it, meant for clutching a much larger cranium, was pulled together at the top, in a kind of cone shape. It reminded me of a plunger, and that made it entirely too tempting to pass up. On my way out, I took it and plunged it up and down on her head, making a sucking noise.
She giggled.
I froze. It was the first sound I had ever heard her make. I whirled around to see if Farid or anybody else had heard it. But no, we were alone in the hallway. When I looked back down at her, she had moved. But not just moved—as it took me a moment to comprehend: she was running very slowly away from me, looking back and waiting for me to chase her. So I chased her. She burst out laughing and took off for real. We ran all around the house for a full ten minutes. Farid came out of his room and did a double take as she sprinted past. He too froze, not wanting to break the spell. I scooped up Leena and carried her, smiling and giggling, over to Farid, and delivered her into his arms.
Farid was wide-eyed. “That is amazing,” he said, shaking his head.
“It is amazing,” I said.
And just like that, from one day to the next, after months of not speaking, Leena had broken through her stone casing. She was a happy little girl.
It was May 2007, and I was going on another mission. I had planned it for just after Liz’s visit, knowing that I would be out of contact for two weeks. Our seven days together in April had passed quickly; watching her leave again was crushing. The short times together were glorious, but the oceans of time between brought me down at some point every day. But we had made a decision during her visit in April: we would commit to each other. We would try to make our relationship work, painful as the distance promised to make it.
Now I was going off, back into the wilderness to find more families, this time to the Nuwakot District, just north of Kathmandu.
As in Humla, I had many
hours alone with my thoughts. I thought about the last conversation I’d had with Liz before leaving. It was tense. All we had to keep our relationship together were e-mail and phone conversations over a static-filled Internet connection. We were not sure when the next time we would see each other would be. And now I was going away for two weeks, cutting us off completely. I think we were both surprised at how deeply we were affected by the thought of not being able to speak every day. On those long treks through Nuwakot, I allowed myself to daydream about her, to replay our conversations, to think about what we would do the next time she came to Nepal, whenever that would be. She was already almost out of vacation days.
I was in love with her. I thought about her constantly. I missed her. She was my best friend. Yet I never saw her. I mulled over different solutions, different ways I might be able to get her to visit or find ways of visiting her. But in the end, we lived nine thousand miles apart, and I just didn’t know if we could ever overcome that. Worse, I was afraid she might be thinking the same thing. I knew that there were other men lobbying to date her. Rich guys, guys with impressive jobs in DC. I knew that she had turned them down, and she always told me how much she wanted to be with me, not with them. But they were there, and I wasn’t. I began to realize that love wasn’t always enough. I walked slower than usual that day, unable to shake that depressing realization.
Two weeks later, I was back in Kathmandu. In the final day of my mission, I had come to a decision that I was anxious to share with Farid. We met down at the local tea shop, where we spent most of our time when we were not with the Dhaulagiri kids. I started by filling him in on the details of the trip, about the seventeen families I’d found. Farid listened for a long time, and paused before responding, studying my expression.
“You did very well, Conor. Seventeen families. You should be happy,” he said. We had spent almost two years together in close quarters—he could tell when something was bothering me.
“It’s not that, I am happy, the trip went well—but I think that I need a break. I was thinking that I might go back to the States for a bit, maybe six weeks. There are two NGN fund-raisers going on, I could help with those,” I told him. “But what would you think? I’m worried it would be a big burden, managing everything from here alone, no?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Of course you should go, Conor! We so rarely take breaks, and you remember that I took one last month?”
He was referring to a two-week trip into the mountains he had taken to live among the Buddhists in the Khumbu region of the high Himalaya, the home to Everest, to learn more about the Buddhist culture in that beautiful mountain setting.
“I can see it, you need this break,” Farid continued. “Go visit your family. And I think you want very much to see Liz, no?”
“I really do, yeah. I think we need to have a talk.”
“So go! We are fine. We have a very good system. We have our staff. The children are fine. I am very happy to do this alone. You were here before me, you remember? It is time for your break,” he said. “And I think Liz will be very happy to see you, too.”
“She better be,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
Eight
I returned to Nepal after six weeks in the States, bearing photos of Liz and me from the day I proposed to her. The kids went berserk at the news.
“She really say yes, Brother? You are very sure?” asked Anish.
“I am very, very sure, Anish.”
“And her father? Her mother? They also say yes?”
“Yes, Anish—everybody said yes. Her mother said yes, her father said yes, she said yes. We are getting married.”
Only Priya and Yangani, the two girls, asked for details on how it happened. I told them that I had taken her down to the dock at her father’s farm, her favorite place in the world, after getting permission from her father.
“You sit on one knee, Brother? Like this?” Priya asked, getting down on one knee and holding up an invisible ring. She must have seen it in a movie.
“Yes, exactly like that. And I said ‘Elizabeth Lyons Flanagan, will you marry me?’ ”
The girls squealed.
“Do not forget about the dog, Conor,” Farid said. He had heard this story a few times now, and sat, amused, on the couch on the far side of the room, watching me regale the children.
Emma, Liz’s dog, had followed us down to the dock on her father’s farm, where I proposed. Somewhere between “Elizabeth” and “Flanagan,” Emma decided it was a good time to belly flop off the floating dock. Eighty pounds of dog hit the water just two feet away, soaking both Liz and me. Liz was laughing so hard that it took me a moment to work out if she had actually said yes. This became, predictably, the best part of the story for the kids. They made me tell it twice.
Farid and I spent a couple of days down in Godawari at Little Princes. I had missed them. But then it was time to get back to work. Our mission to find families would continue.
Farid and I became more efficient at finding families in remote areas. We knew how to put together search teams and assemble the supplies we would need, and we knew how to ask the right questions. Actually reuniting the children with their families, though, turned out to be a much more complicated beast. Every parent was overjoyed to find their son or daughter again. But when they learned that their child was being well taken care of, they were suddenly reluctant to take him or her home. Nepal is a terribly poor country; it is a challenge to support a family.
I understood the parents’ perspective, but it put us in a difficult position. We were committed to doing what was best for the children, and the children were desperate to return home. We believed they had a right to be raised in their own homes, in their own communities—a belief shared by UNICEF and virtually all major child protection organizations. NGN existed to protect that right. Yet there were countless reasons why a child might not be able to return home. For example, one of their parents may have remarried; in Nepal, under those circumstances, the new stepmother or stepfather would rarely accept any children from the previous marriage. Sometimes we suspected abuse by an uncle or cousin. On several occasions we learned that the parent was actually aiding a child trafficker. All of these circumstances would put a returned child at risk.
One issue we thought we could overcome was the financial problem. By offering an impoverished parent a monthly stipend to help support their child in their own home, the family would be reunited, and it would cost us less than supporting the child at Dhaulagiri House. When a mother came to visit her son and indicated that she was eager to bring him home but would have difficulty paying for his food and education, we calculated how much she would need and offered her monthly support. The boy was reunited with his mother, and we monitored the situation closely.
It didn’t take long to conclude that this solution would not work. As it turned out, by supporting a family under these circumstances, we were, in effect, rewarding precisely those people who had chosen to give their children to traffickers. We learned that this was likely to inspire neighbors to send their child off with a child trafficker, hoping that they might miraculously end up in the hands of a Western nonprofit organization. Never mind that the great majority of these children never returned; the neighbors focused on the one child who did return safely and whose family was now being mysteriously rewarded for it.
Reunification was going to be much harder than we thought.
A breakthrough came, as it always seemed to, at the tea shop.
Farid and I were talking about Solo Khumbu, the region in northern Nepal that spanned the tallest part of the Himalayan range—the home of Everest. Farid had made several trips to the region to spend time alone in the Buddhist villages, where he could stare at the stars and meditate with the monks. I was describing the glacier I had seen near Everest Base Camp, a long mass of ice and rock that was, at the same time, both un
movable and unstoppable.
“It’s like this work,” Farid said, with something between a laugh and a sigh.
“What, unmovable?”
“Unmovable, exactly,” he said. Then, after thinking about it for a moment, he added, “But you know, maybe also unstoppable. Everything just moves more slowly than we are used to, Conor. We cannot see the progress sometimes, I think. Maybe ‘Nepali time’ is a real thing,” he said.
“Nepali time” was an expression I heard probably once a day. It was always said by a Nepali who was well behind deadline, always to a foreigner who couldn’t understand why the deadline hadn’t been respected. Nepali time meant that everything moved slower in Nepal. I imagine many countries around the world have a similar expression.
Farid’s comment was profound. We spoke about Nepali time with disdain, as an excuse for laziness. Often it was, of course. But maybe, as Farid had suggested, it was more than that. Maybe it was the pace at which things had to move here. We had thought that reuniting children with their families should have been straightforward—either they could go back or they couldn’t. But what if it was more complicated than that? What if we were giving up too soon? What if, Farid suggested, instead of pressing a parent to take back a child when they visited, we slowed the process down? What if we just let a parent visit their children, with no pressure to take their child home?
Remarkably, this worked. Success was still rare, and we had to cultivate the relationship with the parent over a number of weeks, but it was worth it. Two of the children from Dhaulagiri, a brother and sister named Puspika and Pradip, were visited by their mother no fewer than six times in eight weeks. On the ninth week, she came and asked if she could bring her children home. We were helping families become reacquainted after years of separation.
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