Conor Grennan is an old friend of Umbrella’s, having been very close with Viva and Jacky ever since they were able to assist him finding the seven trafficked children he was searching Kathmandu for.  ‘Little Princes’ is his story of how a trip to Nepal to volunteer for a few months ended up having a much bigger impact on his life then he would have ever imagined. The book has been getting rave reviews in Canada and the US, where it has been released so far, with critics claiming that it could even surpass the acclaimed ‘Three Cups of Tea’, by Greg Mortenson.

In the book, while describing how he became so attached with the children in the Little Princes home, where he was volunteering during the latter stages of Nepal’s recent civil war, which ended in 2006, Conor goes into detail about his experience of working with Umbrella and has only good things to say about the work that we are doing, in trying to rescue children from corrupt and abusive homes in the capital. As a result of this new exposure, we have already received applications from perspective volunteers and child sponsors, and with Conor’s worldwide tour set to continue for the rest of the year, it bodes very well for us and couldn’t come at a better time.

Conor is also the founder of Next Generation Nepal (NGN – www.nextgenerationnepal.com), who aim to reconnect trafficked children with their families and culture. NGN are one of Umbrella’s main partners in Nepal, and there team have done great work in searching for the families of our children. NGN opened up a home in Humla, north-western Nepal, where seven Umbrella children now live, back in their own communities. They are also helped us move over 50 of our children back to their district in Rasuwa in April 2011, just south of the Tibetan border.

We would not only like to thank Conor for this, perhaps unintentional, tribute to the work Umbrella do, but also for giving both Viva and Jacky the recognition they never wished for, yet thoroughly deserve!!

                            Conor with seven of the Umbrella children that returned to NGN’s Humla home last year

During a recent interview, fro the book's launch, Conor had this to say:

"I never really wanted to volunteer. Not that I told anyone that, of course. What I actually wanted was to be able to say I volunteered -- to be the kind of person who volunteered. I wanted, in short, to impress people. I figured if I volunteered just once, I could re-tell that story over and over, preferably to women in bars.

That's how I ended up in a small village south of Kathmandu, on the other side of the blue metal gate that opened to the Little Princes Children's Home. I had just begun a year-long round-the-world trip, and I had decided to spend the first three months of it volunteering in Nepal.

I had never worked with children before, but I imagined that the 18 children inside would be sitting quietly on the floor, feeling sad because they were orphans. Instead, I opened the gate and I was immediately tackled by a gang of excited children.


I could not have known it then, but that was the beginning of a new life for me. I would end up not just caring for those 18 children, but rescuing more, searching for them when they were stolen by child traffickers, and trekking through the mountains to find their families after we discovered the truth: they weren't orphans after all, but trafficked children.

My friends were perhaps more shocked than me to discover my transformation. "When did that happen?" they would ask me. I realized that the transformation actually began, not in Nepal, but when I first bought my plane ticket to Kathmandu. At that moment, something in my life had to change. I was on my way to a place that I'd only seen on T.V., to live with a house full of orphans in one of the poorest countries in the world in the middle of a civil war. You cannot live like that for any length of time and come out the same person.

On one inauspicious day at the Little Princes Home, I bought the children toy cars, only to have them break almost immediately; then I watched as the children happily returned to making their own toys out of trash, out of sticks and bottles and old rubber bands. If they tore a plastic grocery bag, they carefully repaired it with tape and continued to reuse the bag. They neatly folded their single set of clothing and washed it by hand in the stream each week.

I didn't have to study the culture -- I learned about it through sheer immersion.

And that, to me, is the joy of volunteering. It requires so little in the way of prerequisite. It doesn't require a particular passion, or a special skill. I had neither of those. It requires only that we make the decision to show up, that we open our minds and hearts to the people we are trying to help, and that we do as we are asked once we arrive. 

Volunteering is the single best way to see how the rest of the world lives. It isn't a question of how the other half lives -- that's a misnomer; it's more like how the other 90 percent of the population lives. We need to see that up close to understand our world, to inform us, to make us better leaders and better colleagues and better neighbors.

This doesn't mean you have to devote your life to that cause. You don't. Experiencing it is the important thing.

But be warned: it might be the first step on what becomes a long path. It might take you in directions you never thought you would ever go. It did for me, with those kids in Nepal. And now -- six years after my trip to Nepal on a lark, six years after my friends proclaimed me to be the most reluctant volunteer to ever put on a backpack -- I can't imagine how I ever lived without those kids.
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