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 Farid speaking with Hari, the part-time house manager, who had just arrived from his other job over at CERV Nepal. They stopped when I came in, reading my concern. Sandra waved me to sit down with them.

“That man who just left,” she said, nodding out the door. “His name is Golkka.”

“Who is he? I thought we didn’t let strangers visit the children,” I said.

“He’s not a stranger. The children know him,” she said. Farid snorted derisively. Hari said nothing. I waited.

Sandra continued, “The children know him because he is the man who took the children from their villages. He is a child trafficker.”

Then, for the first time, I learned the story of how the children at Little Princes had arrived in the small village of Godawari.

Golkka, like the children, was from Humla, a district in the far north-west corner of Nepal, on the border of Tibet—the most remote part of an already remote country. It is completely mountainous, with no roads leading in or out. Most villages there have no electricity or phone service. There is a single airport; from there, the entire region is accessible only on foot or by helicopter. Many children growing up there have never seen a wheeled vehicle. It was in Humla, impoverished and vulnerable, that the Maoist rebels had created one of their first strongholds.

Golkka found that there was opportunity in such a place: he could have access to cheap child labor. He rounded up children orphaned by the civil conflict, a conflict that had thus far resulted in the deaths of more than ten thousand soldiers, rebels, and civilians. He forced the children to walk many days along narrow trails through the hills and mountains—trails that must have resembled the challenging paths up to Everest Base Camp. They walked until they reached a road, where they could catch a bus to Kathmandu. Once there, he kept them in a dilapidated mud house, offering them up for labor. If they wanted to eat, they were forced to beg on the streets.

When tourists discovered the children, they came to the house and asked what they could do to help. Golkka realized he had something much more lucrative on his hands than a mere workforce. He began bringing in volunteers to visit and care for the children. When they bought mattresses so the children would no longer have to sleep on the cold mud floors, Golkka thanked them, and then promptly sold the mattresses as soon as the volunteers left the country. Clothes brought for the children were similarly worn until volunteers left, then taken from the children and given to the trafficker’s family.

Sandra met these children while volunteering. She vowed to break the cycle of corruption. She raised money from France and offered to take the children off his hands. Golkka sensed another opportunity. He demanded payment, about three hundred dollars per child. This would be a small fortune in a country where the average annual salary was around two hundred and fifty dollars. Sandra refused to pay, but continued working with the government and other nonprofit organizations to secure the children’s release. Eventually, pressure from the Child Welfare Board and other organizations grew too much for him, and he let them go with her. Those eighteen children became the Little Princes.

Three months after the rescue, neighbors reported that Golkka’s crumbling home was filled again. He had gone back to Humla and gotten more orphaned children.

“Why wasn’t he arrested? Didn’t the Child Welfare Board know what he was doing?” I asked.

“They know. But Nepal’s laws are weak. He was the legal guardian of the children—he had found family members to sign custody to him. He could do almost anything he wanted with them,” said Sandra.

“So we can do…what, nothing?”

“You have to understand, Conor, this is very serious,” Sandra said, leaning forward. “We had a volunteer here four months ago. She tried to build a case against him with UNICEF and the Child Welfare Board. Golkka found out, and he came to the home and threatened physical violence against her and the children if she continued. She had to leave the country, for her safety and for the children’s safety.”

I didn’t say anything. I was out of my depth. I was only here for another month; this wasn’t my battle. But I found it difficult to control my anger against this man who seemed to be getting away with this, making a profit off the lives of the children. It wasn’t my fight, maybe, but I wanted to join it anyway. I read in Farid’s face a similar sentiment.

“What will happen to the children?” I asked.

“We keep them here, we raise them, and we educate them. They have no family to return to, or at least no family that we know of, except maybe distant relatives who may have signed them away, I suppose,” Sandra said sadly. “Many people—many family members—have been killed in this war.”

“But this guy, we have to let him in when he comes?”

“He’s not just any man,” Hari said, before Sandra could speak. “I know him well. His connections are powerful. He was arrested once, months ago, and he got out of jail after three days because his uncle is a politician. I do not want him here, but we cannot prevent him. He can take the children away from us.” He added, his voice apologetic, “It is Nepal. It is difficult.”

I went to see the children, up in their bedrooms. I was concerned that the visit from a man who had kept them as veritable slaves for two years had traumatized them. Incredibly, they were playing cards and jumping on their beds as if nothing had happened. These were the same kids who cried if they couldn’t find a flip-flop. It was my first glimpse into just how resilient these kids really were. Beneath the showing off, the sulking, the hilarity, there must be an imprint of the terrors they had lived through in Humla—the killings, the child abductions by the rebel army, the starvation. I imagined a steel lockbox at the center of each of them, inside of which they quarantined these memories so that they could live seminormal lives.

It suddenly became very important to me to tell them how much I cared about them. That if they ever needed anything, they could count on me—on us—no matter what. I was going to be a better parent to them, I told myself. That started with opening up to them.

That evening, I went into the bedroom where the older boys were about to go to sleep. I cleared my throat nervously, not sure how to say what I wanted to say.

“Hey boys—listen, you guys should know that I—that all of us—all the volunteers, we really care so much—”

“Conor Brother! What you eat in your country?” Santosh shouted. I had evidently walked into a debate. “You eat meat, yes? You eat animals?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” I said, working to regain my train of thought. “You know, chicken, pig, that kind of stuff.”

“Goat?”

“Well, not really goat, no…more like sheep, cow—”

“Cow?!” Santosh sat up. He translated this for those who had missed it, eliciting gasps and one full shriek from Anish. It dawned on me that this might not be the kind of information I should be sharing with a room full of Hindu children.

“You eat cow?”

“Well, sometimes. You know, now that I think about it, it’s really more my friends who eat—”

“You eat God, Brother?” came an incredulous voice from the other side of the room.

“No, of course not, no, I would never…I mean, it’s not our God, you know, so—”

“Cow not God?!”

Yikes! “No, cow God! Cow God! It’s just that in America and Europe, we—”

“Why you eat?” demanded Santosh.

I was getting desperate. “Look, it’s not really God God, not in the way you’re thinking, not where I’m from, and you have never tried it so you have no idea how it tastes, it’s really popular, probably the most popular meat to—”

There was a thump as somebody’s jaw hit the floor, then silence. I took this as my chance.

“Okay, good night, boys! Sleep well!” I called, backpedaling quickly out the door, reaching my arm back inside to slap blindly at the wall until the lights went out, then closing the door behind me.

That could have gone better, I thought. I gave up on the idea of telling the kids anything. What they needed from me was to screw up as little as possible. They needed me to not tell them, right before they went to sleep, that my favorite food was their God on a bun. They needed me, for three months, to just make sure they were okay, fed, clothed, and bandaged up when need be. I was just a caretaker, but I needed to do that well. That would be a high enough bar for me without trying to change their world.

Excerpted from Little Princes: One Man’s Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal with permission of William Morrow/An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.