Conor Grennan, another hero, backed by a small NGO that he started Next Generation Nepal is walking back roads in Nepal trying to reconnect families with their trafficked children. Here’s part of one of his blog entries.

Karin

He was amazing, Min Bahadur – tall and lanky for a Nepali, always cheerful, exceedingly strong, and sure enough, he knew everybody we passed on the trail. So it was never a surprise to see him walking towards me with a mother and father following him, with a proud smile on his face. He would say something to Rinjin (my equally excellent translator), and Rinjin would turn to me and say “This is the father and mother of Chandra.” But I would know it already – the resemblance was uncanny, it was always uncanny. This was Chandra’s father and mother, Chandra grew up here, he was a baby at one point then learned to walk and to talk with these two people, in this village, around these animals and these fields and on the floors of these mud houses. Then they lost him. To see his real parents with my own eyes, the two people who were meant to be caring for him the way that we had been trying to do for two or three years, was quite honestly like a miracle.

We all had a lot of questions for each other, but I asked mine first. I asked the whole story of what happened with their child as far as they knew, what they had heard, when was the last time they had news about him or her. I asked what the traffickers had promised (it was always the same – to put the child in a boarding school in Kathmandu) and how much money they had charged the parents for this service. That was heartbreaking, hearing how much they had paid these bastards, how much they’d had to borrow, what they had to sell, seeing how incredibly poor they were. Typically, they may have heard from the trafficker soon after giving up their child before being cut off completely. The trafficker would always tell them that their child was in boarding school and was doing great, at the very same moment that I was finding this same child somewhere on the street half starved to death. It’s sick.

I asked about their families, their brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles. I asked about their economic conditions, how much land they had, how many animals, everything to get a sense of their financial security, how poor they were. The easy answer was “very poor” but there is more to it than that – all of Nepal is very poor, after all. We want to get a sense of how to allow children to safely come back to their families.

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Adoption, Just thinking