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many hits and I win you in carrom board, Brother? Very funny, yes, Brother?”
    “Just get the cards, Raju.”
    Farmyard Snap, as you may recognize from the name, is the same game as Patience, Memory, or Concentration. You turn the cards facedown, mix them up, and try to match the pairs. In this case, the pictures on the other side were of barnyard animals. It was a well-worn deck of cards, clearly used by other volunteers to help the children learn the English words for the various animals. English was an excellent skill for them to learn, and furthering the education of the children was one of the main reasons for being here. And as we laid out the cards, I tried to remind myself of that. Truly I did. But all I could think about was how badly I was going to crush these kids in Farmyard Snap.
    I won the first game handily. To my slight disappointment, they both just laughed every time I uncovered a match, clapping for me as if they were letting me win. They even cheered for me when I won; Nuraj went out to tell some of the other boys like a proud father. When he returned I challenged them to a rematch to show my victory was no fluke.
    “What means ‘rematch,’ Brother?”
    “We play again—if you don’t mind me winning.”
    “Yayyyyy!” they cried together.
    Games two, three, and four didn’t go as planned.
    Raju and Nuraj held a quick tête-à-tête following their loss in game one and decided they would play as a single team. I consented. Their game-time chatter sounded innocuous enough. It was unclear if they were even talking about the game at all, as I noted during one particularly animated debate between them, which ended when Nuraj put his entire fist in his mouth and Raju sullenly conceded some point. Still, I couldn’t trust them, and I was soon proven right. The cards were bent from extensive use, and they were able to push their little faces against the floor to see what was on the other side. Since they never actually touched the cards, I wasn’t able to penalize them, nor could I get my huge head low enough to see the other side myself—though I did try, which was a source of much amusement for them. They also pointed out to each other where the other donkey was, or where they remembered seeing the ducks. When it was my turn, they tried to distract me by loudly singing Nepali songs or climbing on my back and tugging on my hair. There was nothing in the Farmyard Snap rules against this per se, but it put me at a disadvantage that I was unable to overcome.
    “Remash! Remash!” they chanted after the sixth game.
    “I can’t—remember my broken hand?” I reminded them.
    “Brother, I no think hand broken,” Nuraj said, poking at my hand.
    “Let’s go find the other boys outside,” I suggested.
    “Yayyyyy!”
    The rest of the boys were playing soccer next to a nearby wheat field, and I sent the two little cheaters off to join them. Then I sneaked back to my bedroom and lay down, hoping for an early-afternoon rest. I leaned over to see my travel clock. It was only 10:30 A.M. I groaned and collapsed back on the bed.
    I had first arrived at Little Princes when the children had a few days off from school. They returned to school only on Wednesday, four days later. That Wednesday will forever rank as one of the most peaceful days in my entire life. I took a walk through the village for the first time, along the single-track paths that led through the rice paddies and mustard fields, past the women working the fields, the men weaving baskets out of dried grass on their mud-hardened porches, the mothers carrying babies in slings as they washed their clothes at the public water tap. Everywhere I walked, people would stop what they were doing and watch me pass by. There was always time to stop what you were doing in Nepal—nobody punched a clock or tried to impress anybody else by working through lunch. They woke up, they worked until they had to prepare the fire to cook rice for dinner, then everybody