Little Princes by Conor Grennan Page A

Welfare Board. Golkka found out, and he came to the home and threatened physical violence against her and the children if she continued. She had to leave the country, for her safety and for the children’s safety.”
    I didn’t say anything. I was out of my depth. I was only here for another month; this wasn’t my battle. But I found it difficult to control my anger against this man who seemed to be getting away with this, making a profit off the lives of the children. It wasn’t my fight, maybe, but I wanted to join it anyway. I read in Farid’s face a similar sentiment.
    “What will happen to the children?” I asked.
    “We keep them here, we raise them, and we educate them. They have no family to return to, or at least no family that we know of, except maybe distant relatives who may have signed them away, I suppose,” Sandra said sadly. “Many people—many family members—have been killed in this war.”
    “But this guy, we have to let him in when he comes?”
    “He’s not just any man,” Hari said, before Sandra could speak. “I know him well. His connections are powerful. He was arrested once, months ago, and he got out of jail after three days because his uncle is a politician. I do not want him here, but we cannot prevent him. He can take the children away from us.” He added, his voice apologetic, “It is Nepal. It is difficult.”
    I went to see the children, up in their bedrooms. I was concerned that the visit from a man who had kept them as veritable slaves for two years had traumatized them. Incredibly, they were playing cards and jumping on their beds as if nothing had happened. These were the same kids who cried if they couldn’t find a flip-flop. It was my first glimpse into just how resilient these kids really were. Beneath the showing off, the sulking, the hilarity, there must be an imprint of the terrors they had lived through in Humla—the killings, the child abductions by the rebel army, the starvation. I imagined a steel lockbox at the center of each of them, inside of which they quarantined these memories so that they could live seminormal lives.
    It suddenly became very important to me to tell them how much I cared about them. That if they ever needed anything, they could count on me—on us—no matter what. I was going to be a better parent to them, I told myself. That started with opening up to them.
    That evening, I went into the bedroom where the older boys were about to go to sleep. I cleared my throat nervously, not sure how to say what I wanted to say.
    “Hey boys—listen, you guys should know that I—that all of us—all the volunteers, we really care so much—”
    “Conor Brother! What you eat in your country?” Santosh shouted. I had evidently walked into a debate. “You eat meat, yes? You eat animals?”
    “Uh, yeah, I guess,” I said, working to regain my train of thought. “You know, chicken, pig, that kind of stuff.”
    “Goat?”
    “Well, not really goat, no . . . more like sheep, cow—”
    “Cow?!” Santosh sat up. He translated this for those who had missed it, eliciting gasps and one full shriek from Anish. It dawned on me that this might not be the kind of information I should be sharing with a room full of Hindu children.
    “You eat cow?”
    “Well, sometimes. You know, now that I think about it, it’s really more my friends who eat—”
    “You eat God, Brother?” came an incredulous voice from the other side of the room.
    “No, of course not, no, I would never . . . I mean, it’s not our God, you know, so—”
    “Cow not God?!”
    Yikes! “No, cow God! Cow God! It’s just that in America and Europe, we—”
    “Why you eat?” demanded Santosh.
    I was getting desperate. “Look, it’s not really God God, not in the way you’re thinking, not where I’m from, and you have never tried it so you have no idea how it tastes, it’s really popular, probably the most popular meat to—”
    There was a thump as somebody’s jaw hit the