Learning Objective: At the end of the session, the students are expected to be able to develop critical thinking skills through expressing opinions regarding the story in the lesson.



Trains...


What are the different types of trains you know?

How many times have you ridden a train?

What's the fastest you have tried?


Let's talk about a particular train in the past.


Let's call it "The Orphan Train".



"I had the whole future ahead of me, and I didn't know what to expect." -- Elliot Bobo



Eighty years ago, Elliot Bobo was taken from his alcoholic father's home, given a small cardboard suitcase, and put on board an "orphan train" bound for Arkansas. Bobo never saw his father again. He was one of tens of thousands of neglected and orphaned children who over a 75-year period were uprooted from the city and sent by train to farming communities to start new lives with new families. Elliot Bobo's remarkable story is part ofThe Orphan Trains.


The story of this ambitious and finally controversial effort to rescue poor and homeless children begins in the 1850s, when thousands of children roamed the streets of New York in search of money, food and shelter--prey to disease and crime. Many sold matches, rags, or newspapers to survive. For protection against street violence, they banded together and formed gangs. Police, faced with a growing problem, were known to arrest vagrant children--some as young as five--locking them up with adult criminals.




Elliot Bobo was eight years old when he was put on a train. His mother had died when he was two. "Far as I know, my father hit the bottle pretty heavy, and they took us away from him." The Children's Aid Society gave him the small suitcase he still has. "I had all my possessions in there, which wasn't much. No shoes, just a change of clothes."


He did not know--no one knew--where he or the other children would wind up.




Placement into new families was casual at best. Handbills heralded the distribution of cargoes of needy children. As the trains pulled into towns, the youngsters were cleaned up and paraded on makeshift stages before crowds of prospective parents. Elliot Bobo remembers the ordeal:



A farmer came up to me and felt my muscles. And he says, "Oh, you'd make a good hand on the farm." And I say. "You smell bad. You haven't had a bath, probably, in a year." And he took me by the arm and was gonna lead me off the stage, and I bit him. And that didn't work. So I kicked him. Everybody in the audience thought I was incorrigible. They didn't want me because I was out of control. I was crying in the chair by myself.



Let's think about this.


1. In your own words, describe the Orphan Train based on your own understanding of the text.


2. How do you feel for the orphan kids including Elliot Bobo? Please explain why.


3. Do you think the idea of "Orphan Train" helped improved the lives of these young children? If yes, how? If no, why not?


4. Is there any reason for us to be grateful and thankful that somehow we never experienced to be orphans?


5. Do you consider yourself lucky enough compared to those kids in the orphan train?