FLR: When did Santosh get interested in starting a library in Humla?
CG: Santosh always wanted to do something for his village – he saw, as most of the children did – that they were in such desperate need of help. He saw that he had, despite the terrible life he’d suffered through for a few yeas, been one of the lucky ones.
When my colleague Farid and I opened a small library in the village of Godawari, the children loved it. They had never experienced a library before, a place outside of school where they could just sit and read whatever they wanted. Santosh saw immediately how powerful that was, and asked if it would be possible to start one in his own village. He saw that all it took were books and a place to keep them, and he set to work figuring out how to make it happen. I was so proud of him.
FLR: Is there still a lot of child trafficking that goes on today or was it mainly during the civil war? Has Golkka been stopped yet or is he still in the business of trafficking?
CG: The trafficking is not as bad as it was during the war, but it continues today. There are different excuses now – that there is no education in the village, or that the children need to have a future outside the village. There is nothing wrong with migration to the city, but these children and parents are taken advantage of, exploited. That’s why we are still working so hard to prevent it.
I wish I could say that Golkka was rotting in jail. Unfortunately not only is he free, he is the head of a powerful political party in Humla, in the remote northwest region of Nepal. Nepal has very little in the way of rule of law – we hope the book brings more pressure on the government to do something about that.
FLR:How often are you able to visit Nepal and the children now that you are based stateside on the board of directors?
CG: Not as often as I’d like – Nepal is so far away, and with my own child and one on the way, it becomes more difficult. Still, Liz and I get back at least once a year together, and I go back about twice a year. I was able to go back in October of the past year. I do stay very close to the action on email though – I’m involved in the day-to-day operations of the organization.
FLR: How do you balance in your own head the horrendousness of child trafficking and the idea that in some ways the kids that you have found and helped educate before returning them to their families, have more opportunities in life as a result?
CG: It’s a very difficult moral question in many ways – one we think about a lot. I am very happy that we were able to give those children an opportunity. And it even creates problems in some way, because when we find the families, they tend to believe that they were right, in some way, to have sent their children away. But what we make sure they understand is that for every one child we find, there are 20 that we don’t find, maybe that we never find, who are still suffering, who never get an education. The ones we rescue cannot justify the terrible risk the parents take, giving their children to traffickers.
We are very pro-education. But the risk that parents take to save their children, much more often than not, leads to disaster for the children and the families.
FLR: What effect do you think these kids will have on their communities and on the country as a whole?
CG: I really hope they will have a profound effect. They were the inspiration for the story that I hope will raise a lot of awareness. More directly, though, we hope the older ones will join Next Generation Nepal and help us raise awareness, help us find families. This is already happening with the oldest boy, and it gives me great hope for the impact they can have. They are all desperate to do good for their communities.
FLR: On your website you discuss how you had to completely immerse yourself in the Nepalese culture in order to understand the families and their children. You had, of course, already traveled and lived in Europe and made a trip around the world, but how easy was this for you and why? What were some of the challenges in completely immersing yourself in the culture?
CG: It’s true that living abroad had helped tremendously. To me, it is like the secret to learning a foreign language – you have to stop trying to make the words fit into an English structure. You have to let that go and just hear what they are saying, starting over, almost like a child. I find it is when I have expectations that things should be a certain way that I run into the most trouble.
That being said, Nepal was unlike any culture I’d ever tried to integrate into, and it is a far cry from European cultures. Almost everything was different, and it took time for things to become even slightly normal. But immersion makes like easier. If you are forced to use an outhouse only every once in a while (if you’ll forgive the example), it is always something you dread, every time. On the other hand, if it becomes your only option, you quickly get used to it, it becomes part of your day. That’s immersion: A harder beginning, but a happier life.
FLR: According to your website, the advances from Little Princes allowed you to hire an executive director of Next Generation Nepal. How else, directly or indirectly, do you see the publication of this book benefiting the trafficked and displaced children of Nepal?
CG: Having an Executive Director has been amazing – we are very fortunate to have Hallie Tamez, a deeply passionate, driven, compassionate leader for our operations. We were also able to take a big chunk of the advance and build a new children’s home in Humla, where the children are from, allowing us to fulfill our dream of bringing the children back to their communities. Sometimes we call it The House that HarperCollins Built, we are just so grateful.
But I also hope that the book itself will raise awareness for the country and the children, that it will put some international pressure on the Nepalese government to take better care of their children and fight child trafficking, and help us raise money to get more children connected to their parents.
FLR: As of yet, have you received any celebrity support for Next Generation Nepal (NGN)?
CG: Not too much yet, but I keep dreaming! The wonderful designer Prabal Gurung, a native of Nepal, has been incredibly supportive – we love him! And Nate Berkus read a copy and had me on his show, which will air January 25th. We hope that more celebrities will take on this cause!
FLR: What would you be doing now if you had not made the fateful decision to volunteer at Little Princes?
CG: I imagine I would probably still be in Europe, or somewhere else abroad. I hadn’t really intended to return to the States too soon – I loved working in public policy, or in something similar, and I loved living abroad. But who knows – I was excited to come back to New York for the first time in many years as well. I hope that somehow God would have led me to meeting my wife Liz in a different way.
FLR: What was your initial reaction as some families who, due to extreme financial hardship, decided they could not take on another child at that time and did not bring their child back?
CG: It was really difficult to understand at first. Again, I was seeing it as an American – I wasn’t immersing myself in their culture, in what they were seeing. But as I got to know the situation better, I thought about what I would think if somebody was taking good care of my own child – that would be my number one priority, I’m sure. I became a lot more sympathetic to their viewpoint. But still, we work for the children, not the parents, and if we believe that parents really can take their children back, that becomes our goal, to do that safely.
FLR: Please share with us your writing process and how you recorded your time in Nepal. Did you keep a journal during your time at Little Princes, and how difficult, if at all, was it to find the time to write?
CG: I wrote a ton! I had kept a journal since I was a senior in high school, every night. Mostly I kept it just to try to make myself laugh – I never intended it to be public. But when I was about to travel around the world, the blog seemed like a great way to make the journal public and to share my adventures with my family and friends.
For me, though, I could never just write a normal blog. Each one had to be a little story, with a beginning and an end. I went through at least two drafts of each one before I actually uploaded it. And in between, I took tons of notes, I had a notebook with me at all times to record conversations with the kids and little details, so I would get it exactly right.
Finding time to write wasn’t too hard. The kids went to bed at 8 p.m., and I prefer to write at night. I had with me a very light second-hand laptop that I wrote on each night for a few hours, using the notes I had taken during the day. That became the blog, and many of those stories (though by no means the majority) appear in some shape or form in the book.
FLR: The name of the orphanage, “Little Princes,” seems especially poignant given the themes of Exupery’s “The Little Prince” and ‘being responsible forever’ for what you have tamed, and how the rose may be ordinary but is unique because of the time spent taking care of it. Not that these kids were ordinary in any way or even that they needed to be tamed. Do you know where the name originated?
CG: Yes – the founder of Little Princes was a woman named Sandra, from France, and she came up with the name. It seemed perfect – they were almost all little boys (16 of 18 children were boys), and they were all, in some sense, alone, but yet not alone at all. They had wonderful imaginations and, as we learned, incredible resilience. But they had to find their way in life, and all we could do was help try to help them find it.
FLR: How do you avoid burn out?
CG: Farid and I worked pretty much non-stop when we were in Nepal, seven days a week. It just seemed to work for us. But when one of us needed a break, we really encouraged the other to take it. It also helped dramatically to have a partner to rely upon. Doing this alone would have been nearly impossible.
When I got back to the US, it became even harder in a way, because I was trying to juggle other things, including going to business school. Luckily, and even miraculously, the opportunity to write a book came along, and that took care of a lot, since I was able to hire an Executive Director. It took a lot of pressure off, and soon we were working well as a team. That always helps, I think.
FLR: What is Farid doing these days?
CG: Farid is getting his master’s degree in development in France at the moment. But I am thrilled to announce that he is returning to Nepal late this Spring to once again be our Country Director. We couldn’t have done any of this without him, and the children are over the moon thinking about his return! |
