I never got there, but I saw a lot of kids who did.

After my parents died, I told myself I didn’t care what happened to me. But I did. I didn’t want to grow up in an orphanage, with friends who came and went like ships in the night. I wanted a mother and a father and a home that only we lived in. I wasn’t the only one.

One Sunday afternoon, a group called the Christian Brothers visited the orphanage. They described a better life: work outside in the fields, families ready to take us, a wonderful school in an exciting place called Australia. It sounded a lot better than this place, but I was skeptical. It sounded too good to me. But not to many of the others. Hands went up around the room. And as they did, the kids were called forward. One of those hands was Alistair Hughes. Orville reached for him to put it down, but it was too late; they were already ushering him into the crowd to leave. Orville joined them without a word. He nodded to me as he left.

I learned later that all was not as the Christian Brothers had promised. The program was actually the continuation of similar initiatives in the seventeenth century, when children were shipped to the Virginia colony as migrant labor. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly 150,000 children were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Rhodesia. They worked in harsh conditions, but the work was only part of their suffering. From the 1940s until 1967, about 10,000 children were shipped to Western Australia to work in the fields and live in orphanages. Physical and sexual abuse was rampant and only discovered in later years. In 2009, Australia’s prime minister formally apologized to those children who had suffered under the program, for what he called “the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost.”

I, too, was watching my childhood slip away. I had started to grow pessimistic that I would ever find a home when a woman named Sarah Moore began volunteering at the orphanage. She was kind and very smart. She reminded me of my mother. She taught me French, which I picked up quickly, to her delight. Her husband was more stoic, but I thought he liked me too.

One Sunday, the woman in charge of our ward told me to make ready to leave. I was scared to death as I stuffed my meager belongings in the sack they’d given me.

I was overjoyed when Sarah and her husband Robert came into the room and told me I was coming to live with them. Against my will, I cried, but that was okay with them. They simply hugged me and loaded my things into their shiny car and drove away.