Little Princes by Conor Grennan Page B

was right. This woman should be dead. We had been told as much by the children themselves. But there was no mistaking this woman. I saw it on Hari’s face as well when he greeted her; this was the boys’ mother. Hari pulled up a stool next to her and spoke quietly to her for a few minutes. Then he looked back at us.
    “Farid Brother, Conor Brother, this is the mother of Nuraj,” he said simply. “I can translate for you if you tell me what you would like to know.
    “Everything, Hari,” said Farid, leaning toward the mother. She would not meet his eyes. “We want to know everything.”
    That’s how we learned the full story of the children at Little Princes.
    Two years earlier, Nuraj’s mother, like so many mothers during Nepal’s civil war, feared for the lives of her children. Humla, all but cut off from the world, was fertile ground for the brutal Maoist takeover. Far from the reach of any police force or law, the Maoist rebels exiled the locally elected officials, promising a better life for the community under their rule. The impoverished villagers were left with little choice. Certainly they had no means of fighting back. Many even held out hope that the Maoists would keep their promise. The monarch was the root of their misery, they were told by the rebels, not the drought or isolation or severe underdevelopment. Everything would change now.
    But the Maoists had an army to build. They had to stay strong to protect the village from the royal oppressor, they said. They destroyed the bridges, making it all but impossible for the Royal Nepalese Army, recently mobilized against the rebel threat, to enter the villages of southern Humla. The Maoists preached the tenets of communism. They put in place a law that said families had to provide food to the rebel army. Subsistence farmers gave freely at first, hoping their contribution from their scant reserves would suffice. But the army grew quickly, and with it the demand for food. Men were unable to feed their families, as everything was going to the Maoists. They asked the rebel leaders to leave them with enough for their children. Still the Maoists demanded more, but now at gunpoint. When they were refused, persuasion turned to threats that turned to beatings.
    And then just food was not enough. The Maoist rebels wanted more power, a bigger army. They asked for volunteers. Some joined out of belief for the cause, but many more joined out of fear and desperation. The rebels had already taken their food; it would be better to be on the strong side and at least be able to feed their families. When the pool of volunteers dried up, the Maoists made another law: each family would give one child to the rebel army. Maoist soldiers conscripted children as young as five years old to become fighters, cooks, porters, or messengers depending on the child’s age and ability. There was nowhere to hide. Children were taken from their mothers, disappearing into the rebellion.
    Then, one day, as if delivered by God, a man came to the village. The man was the brother of a former district leader, a powerful man in the region before the rebels took over. He could protect the children. He would take them far away from Humla to the last refuge in Nepal, the Kathmandu Valley. He would put them in boarding schools, where they would learn to read and write for the first time in their lives. The children would be fed and cared for. Most importantly, they could never be abducted by the rebel army. This man was Golkka.
    Nuraj’s mother and father begged him to take their children. It would be expensive, they understood, but they would pay anything. To raise the money, they sold their home and moved into single-room huts with their neighbors. They sold their land, their livestock. They borrowed from distant relatives. They would be going into debt for the rest of their lives, putting the rest of their family at risk, but it was worth every rupee to save their boys from the Maoist army. In