“He’s running around like any other kid now, except he has a bandage on his hand and a splint that goes up to his elbow,” said Maj. David Howell, the Michigan National Guard physician’s assistant who brought Mohammed to Lansing.

The son of a translator for the U.S. Marines, Mohammed and his family were thrown into poverty after his father and uncle were killed by Iraqi insurgents. Mohammed never received medical attention for his burns.

“Mohammed will never have a father again and his mother never marry again, but we can try to help the family as much as we can by helping Mohammed here,” Howell said.

Mohammed’s surgeries, expected to continue for the next six months, will include skin grafts to damaged areas on his ear, face, left eye and scalp and will resume once his hand heals. While the surgeries are under way, Mohammed is staying in Lansing with an Iraqi American host family, where his host mother, Ziena Saeed, said Mohammed, who loves soccer and Xbox games, feels at home.

“My boys (and Mohammed), they kind of act like siblings now where they get in arguments. … They’ve really gotten used to each other,” she said, referring to Mohammed and her two sons, who are 7 and 9 years old.

Mohammed has adjusted to life in America, where he has learned to love basketball, baseball and french fries from McDonald’s.

“Once he found McDonald’s, boy, it was like, ‘OK I know where I want to go now,’” said Charles Thomas, a physician’s assistant working with Lanigan on the surgeries. “He went (to McDonald’s) after he had his surgery. After he woke up, that’s where he wanted to go.”

Howell said his family is inspired daily by Mohammed, a boy who had eaten only a piece of bread and an egg in the 24 hours before he began his trip to America, who loved soccer but had never owned a soccer ball or a pair of shoes.

Though Howell said Mohammed was nervous in the hours leading up to his first surgery, he is excited for the end result: a normal life in his hometown of Ramadi, Iraq. Without the surgery he is receiving, Howell said Mohammed would not have been able to marry or have a family in the culture he was raised in.

But Mohammed’s return home in about a year will be bittersweet, Howell said, as he is now “part of the family.”

“My kids adore him and he fits right in,” he said. “We’re all getting attached to Mohammed. And he’s getting attached to us.”