Little Princes by Conor Grennan Page A

up, throwing my bike onto a train, and coasting all the way to Bali, where I learned to surf from the young local boys giving lessons on the beach.
    I finally gave up my bike in South America, where I hiked the Inca Trail with not just my old college buddies—Charlie, Steve, and Kelly—and their wives, but also with my brother and my mom. I flew into northern Peru and floated twelve hundred miles down the Amazon in a local boat, lying in a hammock packed in among the natives, eating the piranha they served twice a day plus (thank God) some granola bars, and watching the jungle pass by through sheets of rain.
    I spent many days alone, but most of the time I was with other backpackers. In every country, backpackers were in vacation mode, travel mode, drinking mode, anything-goes mode. I bungee-jumped in Peru, became a licensed paragliding pilot in Bolivia, learned to windsurf in Vietnam, and rock-climbed in Thailand. I thwarted gangs attempting to mug me twice in the same day in Ecuador, got my camera snatched right out of my hand in Indonesia, got stitches in my calf in Vietnam, had X-rays taken of my knee in Singapore, and saw some of the world’s magnificent sights.
    I found I had developed new feelings toward the children I saw begging on the street. Street children are common to every poor city, and I had always gone well out of my way to avoid them. I knew that they were working for somebody, that the begging was a scam. But since my experience in Nepal, for the first time, I saw them as normal children. Given a safe home, an opportunity to go to school, and people who could look out for them, they would be no different from the children at Little Princes. It made me miss Nepal and Little Princes all the more.
    On a warm day in late October 2005, I walked off the plane at JFK Airport in New York, having completed my year-long round-the-world adventure. With almost no savings left, I stayed with my father and stepmother, both professors at Vassar College in New York, who had rented a beach house for the winter on Long Beach Island, a peaceful New Jersey coastal community, during their sabbatical. I needed a break after twelve months of nonstop travel, living out of a backpack. But within a couple of weeks, I found myself missing Nepal. In January 2006, almost exactly a year after I’d left Nepal, I landed back in Kathmandu for another three-month stint. I had just about run through my entire savings. It would be a nice way to officially end my travels before rejoining the working world.
    T he bus from Kathmandu to the village was crammed with the familiar smells of dust and sweat and spice. I was returning to a country that afforded me no personal space, that gave no thought to hygiene, that offered no decent food. My throat tightened as the minibus pulled into Godawari. I walked slowly down the path, past the wheat fields and mud houses where buffalo were staked to front porches, squeezing past the women coming back from the rice paddies, single file, eyes cast downward, carrying planet-sized loads of grass on their backs. What was I trying to prove? I had accomplished what I had set out to do the year before. I passed the last mud house on the right, where the path dipped and Little Princes Children’s Home came into view.
    From a distance I saw the children playing on the rooftop terrace. One small figure stopped what he was doing and stared in my direction. Then, like a sailor spotting a whale, he pointed at me and waved his arms at the others, desperate to get their attention. Suddenly a mass of children were pointing at me, waving. From across the fields the wind carried “ Conorrrrr !” in waves.
    Wading through a sea of children once again—I remembered to take off my backpack this time—I discovered the only person above four feet tall was Farid. He had been here for the entire year.
    “Welcome, Conor!” he called to me. “I think the children are very happy to see you!”
    A wide smile spread across my