He is tightlipped about how many times he killed someone, but he said he was in firefights often. "Sometimes we fought the whole day, from morning to morning," he said.

In 2001, he saw his older brother, Ochen, another abductee, in a fellow rebel unit, but Okello does not know where he is now.

The next year, during an attack on his home village, rebel leaders ordered Okello to slay a man they did not realize was his father. Okello said he refused, but had to watch another boy hack his father to death with a machete.

The following day in yet another battle, Okello said, he shot the rebel who killed his father. No one saw him do it, he said.

After four years, Okello took a bullet in his right arm during a skirmish with government soldiers.

"I did not even know they shot me," he said.

He realized it after a few minutes, and rolled under a tree, bleeding heavily, until the rebels fled and army soldiers found him. They took him to a nearby hospital in the town of Kitgum, where his arm was amputated. Like many kidnapped children who are freed from the rebels, he announced his name on the radio. His mother heard him and came to the hospital to get him.

In 2006, Stephen Shames, a freelance photographer in Brooklyn, met Okello when the foundation bearing his name held an art workshop for children in Uganda. Okello, who lags behind at school, is the first person the Shames Foundation has brought here for treatment.

Shames, who worked at The Inquirer from 1986 to 1991, was impressed with Okello and enrolled him with a Ugandan nonprofit partner, Concern for the Future, which helps orphans and war victims. Okello now attends a good boarding school in the Ugandan capital of Kampala; his school and living fees are sponsored by Philadelphia philanthropist Lynne Honickman, who met Okello earlier this month for the first time.

Esquenazi, MossRehab and a local firm, Allied Orthotics & Prosthesis L.L.C., donated their services. The total medical expenses were about $18,000, according to MossRehab's parent, the Albert Einstein Healthcare Network.

Angelo Russello, a certified prosthetist with Allied, came to MossRehab to measure Okello's partial right arm.

Okello's amputation was done slightly below the elbow, leaving him with barely an inch of his lower arm.

"This is actually unusual for what we see," Russello said, gently cupping Okello's stump in his hands. "A piece of the bone is still left in his arm," he said. "This pressure, that hurts a little bit?"

Okello winced. "Yeah, just there," he answered with the stutter he has had since birth.

Moss delivered 320 prostheses last year. Only eight were for patients under the age of 18. That's because children often don't survive a trauma that claims a limb.