It’s 1992, five years since Daniel first fled his village. He’s probably about 10, he doesn’t know for sure. He and the thousands of children he sees along the way have walked countless miles. Sand storms feel like pins in their eyes. The desert sun sizzles at 120 degrees during the day. Temperatures plummet to 45 degrees at night. Daniel wears short pants and a thin shirt. His only other possession is the wooden cross he carries in his hand. His feet are bare. The desert floor grates at the calluses on Daniel’s feet. Calluses turn into blisters. Blisters give way to open sores. Eventually the flesh falls off altogether. Still he walks.

Just when he thinks he can’t take another step, Daniel sees help. It’s a Red Cross camp. Red Cross workers tend to his feet. They give him porridge. For a while, at least, he doesn’t worry about where to find food and water.

But Daniel and the other children can’t stay. They must make room for the throngs of others. Their feet are bandaged, their bellies are filled and they move on. Daniel stops briefly at four of these makeshift camps in Southern Sudan between 1992 and 1999.

In March of 1999, exhausted and dragging, Daniel finally limps toward the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. He and the others are herded into the camp. It’s then that the world starts counting the lost boys — 5,000, 10,000, 20,000. Soon after Daniel arrives, an older boy approaches him, asking him questions about his family. Daniel doesn’t recognize him at first. It’s his older brother, Diing.

Daniel is 17, and his longing for school is reignited. Diing has a plan.

He tells Daniel to go into second grade. Daniel will do well, progress quickly, earn the coveted eighth-grade scholarship and go on to Kenyan high school.

Eager, Daniel enters second grade. The other children, young and innocent, laugh when they see this tall boy, almost a man, sitting dutifully at his small desk. At the end of the day, Daniel asks the teacher to give him a test so he can move to third grade. In a matter of weeks, he takes tests to get through third and fourth grade.

The semester is over, and when classes start up again Daniel goes to another school in a different part of the camp. He tells teachers he’s already been in fifth grade. So Daniel finds himself in sixth grade. Everything is fine until one day in math class the teacher mentions fractions. Daniel only knows about whole numbers. He should’ve learned about fractions in the fourth grade. Maybe he would have if he’d been there for more than a few days. The jig is up. The principal calls him into the office and cautions Daniel to slow down.

As the ’90s draw to a close, Daniel becomes fluent in English while hopscotching from classroom to classroom. The United States government starts taking photos of the boys. It’s the first step in a two-year process to bring many of them to America.

Daniel knows that education is his ticket to a better life. All the lost boys know it. It becomes their motto: Education is my mother and my father. In 2000, Daniel takes his time and spends the whole year in seventh grade. In 2001 he finishes eighth grade and passes the grueling exams.

But Daniel still has another test to pass, the one given by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. Daniel sits in a room across from a man with a neatly groomed beard. The man asks him questions involving times and dates — complicated, since the Sudanese don’t measure time the way the Western world does. After all, Daniel doesn’t even know his birthday. He knows only what his mother had told him: that he was born when the war broke out. The way his villagers see it, that could have been any time between 1980 and 1984.

The United States assigns all the lost boys a universal birthday: Jan. 1. The year depends on each child’s size. Daniel’s running tally over the years puts him at 17. He must be tall for his age. The government assigns him the birth year 1980, which instantly makes him 21. Classified as an adult, he undergoes a more rigorous INS interview process.

So Daniel looks the bearded man in the eye and answers all his questions. When the interview is over the man, and the boy who with a stroke of a pen became a man, shake hands. Weeks later, Daniel receives the coveted envelope decorated with the United States seal. He’s going to America.