A few days later, Kovach fired off a simple e-mail to CNN.

"I was so moved by this story that for several days now I can't seem to get it out of my head," it said. "My wife and I would like to somehow help his family and their little boy."

Five minutes of television was about to change the lives of two families.

Unanswered questions

Urologists in Bangladesh had done their best to preserve the boy's urethra, the tube through which we urinate. They bore a tiny hole so Okkhoy could stand up and relieve himself.

But what he needed was a penis.

The surgery is a specialized one, unavailable in Bangladesh.

"He needs to look like a boy again," Khan says. "The psychological healing can only come after the physical healing."

But there were so many unanswered questions: Will the government let the boy out of protective custody to fly for such a surgery? Where would he go? Who would line up the surgeons? And even if it all worked out, how much would it cost?

There were times when Kovach's wife, Branka, worried whether they were in over their heads.

"I started doing the numbers. 'Maybe we can get 150 people to give $100 dollars each,' we think. Then we think, 'Well, not everybody is going to give $100. Let's see if they give $50.' And all of a sudden, you need to ask 300 people. And it's like, I don't even know if I know 300 people."

But they had their minds made up.

"I have kind of an innate naivete about me where I believe anything is possible," Kovach says. Months passed.

A worried father

Inside the Rapid Action Battalion compound where Okkhoy and his family lives, the little boy passes his days kicking around a tattered soccer ball. He rides about in a rickety hand-me-down bicycle. At morning call, he stands at attention beside the soldiers.

"He visits me time to time. I also visit him to time to time and we play together and discuss many things." Sohail, the battalion commander says. "Even after such a thing happened in his life, the boy is still laughing."

But the family, says Okkhoy's father, is irrevocably torn.

Before the attack, they lived in a one-room, tin-roofed shack down a tight littered alley in Kamrangirchar, a landfill-turned-slum in Dhaka that crams more than 400,000 residents in 3 square kilometers (1.15 square miles).

"But back then, life was good," Abed says. "Even if we ate one meal a day, life was good. Now there is this fear in my heart. Yes, we're in protective custody, Yes, they're keeping us safe. But the fear is always there."

The battalion compound is spacious, greener, cleaner.

Okkhoy, his father and older brother live in the men's quarters; his mother and younger sister in the women's.

Abed says his wife spends her days in a daze, mumbling incoherently to herself. "Allah, give back to my son what they took away," she prays daily.

He, too, confesses to breaking down when his son isn't around.

"They destroyed our lives, They destroyed our family. There is no hope for us anymore," he says.

Okkhoy has never been to school. He has a single-minded goal: He wants to join the battalion -- and see his attackers hanged.