Little Princes by Conor Grennan Read Free Book Online Page B

would take us the forty-five minutes back to Godawari.
    T he more time I spent with the children, the more I got a sense of how I was going to survive these two months. The key to sanity, I discovered, was understanding that the children did not need to be supervised every second of every day. If Hriteek climbed the small tree in the garden and was hanging by his knees, for example, I told myself that he had probably been doing that before I got there, and that he still had all his teeth and limbs. When we went to the botanical gardens, the lovely enormous park next door, the kids climbed all kinds of trees, fished in the stream, and had sword fights with fallen branches. It was like hanging out with eighteen little Huckleberry Finns.
    Even around the house, the children at Little Princes could entertain themselves far more efficiently than I ever could. I made a mistake early on of buying them toy cars during one of my trips to Kathmandu—eighteen little cars, one for each of them. They loved them so much they literally jumped for joy. I felt like a Vanderbilt, presenting gifts to the less fortunate. The longest-surviving car of the eighteen lasted just under twenty-four hours. I found little tires and car doors scattered around the house and garden. Nishal and Hriteek, the pair of six-year-olds, shared the last car between them, sliding the wheel-less chassis back and forth across the concrete front porch a few times before running out to play soccer with a ball they had made out of an old sock stuffed with newspaper.
    Though they would never admit it, the kids had far more fun with the toys they made themselves. One boy, usually Santosh, would take a plastic bottle from the trash discarded throughout the village. To this bottle he strapped two short pieces of wood, binding them with some old string. He collected four plastic bottle caps and some rusty nails and pounded them into the wood with a flat rock. And voilà! he had built a toy car. When it wobbled too much going down the hill, he discovered that he could stabilize it by filling the bottle with water. Soon it was racing down shallow hills and crashing into trees. Because he had constructed it, he was also able to fix it. By the end of the day, all the children had built their own cars.
    I never bought them anything after that. Instead, I helped them search for old bottles or flip-flops they could use, or saved for them the toothpaste boxes. Those boxes were so popular that we had to set an order in which each child would receive his discarded box. They didn’t really do anything with them except keep them, to have something to call their own. The cars they made, or the bow and arrows they made out of bamboo, or the little Frisbees they made out of old flip-flop plastic—those things were all individual possessions. They happily shared them with others in Little Princes, but at the end of the day the toy or the piece of prized rubbish would go into their individual cardboard containers that were large enough to hold their two sets of clothes and everything else they owned in the world.
    A man was leaving the orphanage.
    I was a good distance away, walking back to the house after a hike into the hills, but I could see him well enough to know that I didn’t recognize him. That was unusual; we restricted the number of people who could enter the house for the protection of the children. As safe as the village felt, and as protective as the neighbors were of the children, we could not forget the civil war. We were situated on the southern border of the Kathmandu Valley. Just over the hills were villages under Maoist control. When soldiers in single file patrols came through the village searching houses for weapons, our neighbors convinced them to skip Little Princes Children’s Home so as not to disturb the children. To their credit, they always respected this.
    Now, a strange man in the house made me nervous. I ran the rest of the way. Inside, I found Sandra and