For Conor Grennan, a getaway trip led to a life-changing experience.

Grennan, founder and president of Next Generation Nepal, spoke Tuesday as part of the University Lectures Series, which was sponsored by Hendricks Chapel and the College of Visual and Performing Arts. In his presentation, Grennan shared his story of how one trip led him to reunite more than 300 families affected by human trafficking.

“I didn’t go to Nepal to save lost children,” he said. “I just wanted to travel.”

In 2011, Grennan published “Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal,” a memoir of his experiences helping child victims of trafficking in Nepal.  His organization, Next Generation Nepal, is dedicated to reuniting children taken by traffickers with their families.

Grennan said he didn’t know anything about Nepal when he first visited, and wasn’t even aware of the civil war taking place at the time.

After two weeks of trekking in the mountains of Nepal, he decided to volunteer at an orphanage. The orphanage was the opposite of the images he had seen millions of times in commercials on television in the United States, he said.

Children were everywhere, constantly talking to him and asking questions, he said. But it didn’t take long before he got to know each one of the 16 boys and two girls at the orphanage.

Grennan thought he was volunteering in a traditional orphanage, until one day, a woman showed up, claiming two of her children were being kept there. Her claim was true.

The civil war in Nepal caused desperation within rural villages, making some Nepalis trust strangers with their children so they can receive a better education and be safe from the threat of the government, he said. But instead of taking care of them, these strangers were selling the children into slavery.

“We found out that only about 40 percent of kids in orphanages in Nepal are actually orphans,” he said.

The revolution in April 2006 caused Grennan to flee the country, but the idea of reuniting the two children from the orphanage with their mother stayed with him, ultimately inspiring him to go back to Nepal.

He explained that government traffickers sold seven of the 18 children he had helped at the orphanage into slavery.

“I thought, ‘I can’t abandon those kids. If I don’t do this, it won’t get done and the consequences are real,’” he said.

When he returned to Nepal, Grennan found the original seven children, in addition to many others along the way, and reunited them with their families. Often times, he found the children starving and living in terrible conditions as domestic servants.

Grennan said he hopes to continue to inspire people to volunteer and tell their stories. Volunteering, he said, has the potential to change the world.

“People talk of volunteering and say, ‘Don’t do it for the wrong reason,’ when in fact, the reason doesn’t matter,” Grennan said. “What matters is that you help.”

Mary Panella, a junior psychology and policy studies major, said she connected with Grennan when he shared that he didn’t always want to volunteer.

“It’s amazing that he went in with such a different perception, and look at all the people he was able to help,” Panella said.

Smriti Sharma, a Nepali graduate student in environmental chemistry at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, said she liked that Grennan seemed genuine.

“He wasn’t trying to make it all sound exotic,” she said. “He was being real.”

Published on March 6, 2013 at 1:31 am

Contact Angie at antoribi@syr.edu