"I have only one question: Why are you doing this for us?" he asks in Bengali. "Because I love him," Kovach says through a translator. "I felt his grief, I felt his pain and I just wanted to do something. I mean, if it was me, I was hoping somebody else would do the same thing for me."

As he speaks, Abed quietly listens. Tears well in his eyes.

"Thank you, thank you," he says in broken English.

The two men hug.

"It's just what we do," Kovach says. "It's just what we do as human beings."

Tears dried and the tension resolved, Abed relaxes and enjoys the day with his son.

They've been through a lot -- and a lot more lies ahead.

Devastating news

For a boy who spent three months in a hospital, Okkhoy is surprisingly at ease at the Children's Center.

He is struck by the contrast. It is clean, colorful, quiet -- the opposite of the grime and the stench of the medical facility he has been to.

"My heart is fluttering like a butterfly," he says.

For his father, the surroundings mean little if the surgery isn't successful. And he has a clear-cut measure for success: Will my son be able to bear children?

During the pre-surgery consultations, he poses the same question over and over to each doctor.

And each query is met with the same guarded response: That's the great unknown.

"We've seen young men coming back from Iraq who've been injured with rocket-propelled grenades and other things more severe than this," Gearhart says. "But just as far as an injury committed by one person against another, to a child, this is the most severe genital injury that I've ever seen in 23 years of doing this."

He admits the surgery won't be easy.

"This is an operation that is not in the book anywhere," he says. "We'll sort of develop this operation as we go along."

He's enlisted the help of two other doctors: Dr. Richard Redett, a pediatric plastic surgeon; and Dr. Dylan Stewart, a pediatric trauma surgeon.

The doctors plan to take tissue from Okkhoy's forearm -- between his elbow and wrist -- and reconstruct it into the shape of a penis. They will then transplant it down to the groin.

It'll look like a normal penis, Redett says -- but it won't be fully functional. The hospital MRIs have revealed the attack has left little penile tissue around the injury.