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“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.

      I NEVER STAYED AWAY from the orphanage long. On occasion I would head into Kathmandu to meet up with other volunteers from my orientation program, have a beer, a yak steak and fries, and exchange stories from our volunteering gigs. I would tell them about village life; they would talk about life in the city. We tried to outdo one another with crazy stories. My favorite was the time my friend Alex Tattersall, an English guy from Manchester, volunteering in an orphanage in Kathmandu for troubled kids, had his camera stolen by one of the children. By the time he found out who it was, the boy had traded it for a chicken, which he had already killed, cooked, and eaten. The camera had cost five hundred dollars. Alex took a day to cool off, then he came right back to the orphanage, forgave the child, and continued taking care of the kids.

      Other times, when the children were at school, I would go into Kathmandu to visit a simple, run-down artificial climbing wall, where one could practice rock climbing right in the city. The commute to the outdoor climbing wall took three hours, round-trip. There are no destinations written on the front of the local Kathmandu buses. One learns the route from the ten-year-old boy leaning out the open side door as the bus speeds along, looking for passengers, barking the final destination. Often the bus does not even come to a full stop. You are meant to run alongside it, grab a metal bar, swing onboard, then quickly cram your way into the horde of humanity already aboard. If it’s too crowded, you simply cling to the outside and hope cars don’t pass too closely. Sometimes an old lady would be waiting by the side of the road, as there are few official bus stops, and the boy would pound the side to indicate that the driver should slow enough to give the woman a fighting chance to swing herself aboard with the help of the boy.

      I came to enjoy the commute. It was hypnotic, watching life on the Ring Road. It’s different in many ways from the center of Kathmandu, which is dominated by random alleyways lined with tiny shops just large enough for a man and his wares—carpets or plastic buckets or wool. The narrow streets expand into plazas built around Hindu temples, Buddhist stupas, and towering pagodas, giving pedestrians a breath of (relatively) fresh air, not to mention the opportunity to stand still for more than three seconds without getting hit by a bicycle.

      The Ring Road is different. It’s not the claustrophobic labyrinth of Kathmandu but a postapocalyptic, tattered circle of pavement where buildings often sit forty or fifty feet back from the road, choked with vehicle exhaust. The faded yellow line dividing traffic is more of a suggested boundary; cars and motorcycles pull into the path of overladen trucks without hesitation, forcing oncoming traffic onto the dirt shoulder that could have been an extension of the road itself were it not for the clusters of pedestrians, cows, goats, stands selling plastic watch bands, and other stands selling bananas, and everything coated in dust and tinged with carbon monoxide.

      Men and animals, side by side, rifle through large piles of garbage at the edge of the road. The people at this end of the economic scale are often dark-skinned. Complexion is important to social hierarchy in Nepal; it is not uncommon for a light-skinned Nepali to add a “Complexion” line to their résumé. It is a global phenomenon, this judgment of others by skin color, of course. But in Nepal, these men rummaging through the trash next to the Ring Road are undone by much more than just their skin tone. Their fate had been cemented at birth when they were born into the lowest caste of Nepalese society.

      The caste system so dramatically displayed on the Ring Road is the formalized division of social stratification on the subcontinent. Even in Godawari, I often saw manifestations of the caste system. The larger, well-built mud homes typically belonged to the higher-caste residents, the Brahmins. Those belonging to other high-ranking castes often mentioned it without the slightest self-consciousness.

      Even the local English-language newspaper adhered to the rigidity of the caste system. In place of weekend personal ads, they had what they called “matrimonials.” As the name suggested, men, and occasionally women, sought spouses. Men were seeking, invariably, an olive-skinned, “homely” woman from a good family. In the same way personal ads in America might be divided between men seeking women and men seeking men, matrimonial ads in Nepal are broken down by caste.

      The Dalits are the lowest caste. From the window of my bus, I saw Dalits living on the side of the polluted Ring Road. They are unofficially banned from places we took for granted—barber shops, tea shops, and restaurants. So they set up a small mirror on the trunk of a tree, place a wooden stool next to it, and this serves as a barber shop. I watched other men come around selling them glasses of dud chyiaa (milk tea) from a makeshift cup-holder. They created their own parallel lives, outside, among their own. It had

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