The Direction of Intention

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When Conor Grennan was 29 years old he quit his job and decided to travel the world for a year. He was restless and looking for…something.

For reasons that he can’t quite explain, he began his trip by going to Nepal to volunteer for a few months in an orphanage. He didn’t really like kids. He’d never volunteered anywhere. Why was he doing this? He couldn’t explain it to his friends because he couldn’t explain it to himself. He decided that he was doing it because it would make a good story, useful for impressing women, if he could say he’d volunteered in a Nepalese orphanage.

His time at the Little Princes Children’s Home changed the arc of his life. What he found there both shocked him to his core and opened his life to depths of meaning and love that he might have never otherwise known. The children in the home were rambunctious and vibrant. And, he discovered, most were not orphans. There was a civil war in Nepal and the children had been taken from their parents, from their remote villages, unwitting victims of child traffickers. For an enormous fee, the traffickers promised to protect and educate the children only to dump them in the city to die.

Conor’s good pick-up line has become a life-long commitment to reunite the children with their parents. In a country blasted by civil war, desperate in its poverty, he is finding a way to reunite the children with their families. It is dangerous work.

Sometimes your purpose finds you.

His story could be one of insurmountable obstacles. He could have left and never returned, pretended not to know what was going on there. His story is messy and gritty and sometimes tragic. It is a story of great love, resilient spirits, perseverance and a testament to what one person can do when their purpose rises to greet them – and they have the will to rise and meet it.

You can read more about Conor Grennan and his work in his book Little Princes.

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