Monday, August 30, 2010

Little Princes

People always seem to ask me to take care of children, for some reason unknown to me, and every time I don this deer in the headlights look and my brain scrambles for excuses..."I'm too busy," "I'm moving...possibly..sometime..perhaps in the future..." "I have a cat and I would hate it if one of the kids was allergic, went to hug me and fell out in full anaphalactic shock." The truth is..I am TERRIFIED of children. Which makes Connor Grennan one of my newest heros.

"It was well after nightfall when I realized we had gone the wrong way. The village I had been looking fr was somewhere up the mountain...if we could even find the trail in the pitch-dark. My two porters and i had been walking for almost thirteen hours straight. Winter at night in the mountains of northwestern Nepal is bitterly cold, and we had no shelter. Two of our three flashlights had burned out. Worse, we were deep in a Maoist rebel stronghold, not far from where a colleague had been kidnapped almost exactly one year before...I wondered how thing would have been different if I hadn't gotten hurt."

Connor wrote one of the most moving books I've ever read, Little Princes, to be published in February 2011. A few years ago, after working for the EastWest Institute in Prague and Brussell's, Connor was bored with life and quit his job to go on a trip around the world. With friends telling him how selfish and crazy the whole thing was, he decided to try out an act of selflessness and volunteer at an orphanage in Nepal for three months to start out his vacation.

On his second round at the orphanage, Connor discovers seven more children living in poverty and starved half to death. This sets him out on the adventure of a lifetime to save these children that he realizes aren't orphaned at all. In the process he reroutes his own destiny, founds a NonProfit organization, finds love and gains at least 30 new brothers and sisters in a country 9000 miles away from home.

This true story is ABSOLUTELY a MUST READ. At the time, American's were so focused on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq that nobody even noticed the civil war in Nepal, but Connor was in it, risking his life for an impossible fight.

If you'd like to know more about Connor and his NonProfit, Next Generation Nepal, go to www.NextGenerationNepal.org. And mark your calendar for February 2011 to look out for Little Princes by Connor Grennan.