He's five years old and has no penis or testicles... because of someone else. We'll get to that. He survived by some miracle. The doctors in the operating room are trying at all costs to rebuild his penis with fat and muscle, but there's a warning: "It won't work in the first instance," explains Igor José Vaz, the surgeon in charge of the operation.

"We're going to reconstruct some parts of the body. We're going to reconstruct the urethra so that he can urinate standing up", says the surgeon, adding that "this reconstruction has the advantage of simulating the existence of a penis".

The surgical process the boy will undergo is complex and will follow several stages. "The first surgery takes 2 hours, which is to create an opening so that he can urinate standing up," explains the doctor.

"This is followed by another operation to create a penis, which takes about six hours. Then we operate on the child again to make a long urethra, which takes another two hours," explains the surgeon, hours before entering the operating room.

The doctor explains that all these stages of surgery will not define the boy's life. In fact, it should be stressed that the boy's life will never be the same again.

"Since we're not going to use natural tissues... we're going to use similar tissues... in order to have a sex life he'll have to have a penile prosthesis, and all these processes take 17, 18 years before he feels even remotely well."

"We're going to rebuild some parts of the body. We're going to reconstruct the urethra so that he can urinate standing up."

"The probability of it being a successful operation varies from 60 to 70%," says the experienced doctor, who will be accompanied by three to four trainee doctors in the operating room.

Pain, rejection and cruelty

On the other side of the room at the Cruz Azul clinic in Maputo city, we find the mother and child whose lives are hanging by a thread, after the child's aunt decided to amputate his genitals using a knife, to sell for 150,000 meticais in order to pay off debts.

"My son was at his grandmother's house. Then a cousin of mine took the child and went to cut off his sex in the bush," says the mother, sitting on the hospital bed, unable to hold back her tears.

"She said she wanted to sell it to pay off debts, but the customer also wanted the child's eyes and nose. And when she returned to finish the deal, the child was no longer there," she said with some relief.

Hours later, the child was found dying and abandoned in one of Tete's neighborhoods and was taken directly to the Tete provincial hospital.

"This kid has already tried to kill himself. At just five years old, he went to get a knife to kill himself, because boys are always making fun of him because he doesn't have a penis."

"This is a very serious problem. To say that you amputate the genitals of a child of 4 or 5, or someone else, means that that person is going to die because the bleeding is so great that it's impossible to survive," admits the specialist. But as fate would have it, the child survived, or for that matter, God.

The child is currently living through a tube connected to her bladder, which allows her to do what she needs to do. "From a physical point of view she's fine, but in psychological terms she's very destroyed," says the doctor.

Discriminated against because of his physical appearance by his school friends, the boy has already wanted to take his own life. "This kid has already tried to kill himself. When he was only five years old, he went to get a knife to kill himself, because the boys are always making fun of him because he doesn't have a penis," he said.

The treatment takes place as part of a Reconstructive Surgery Program and is funded by the Irish embassy. In terms of cost, such a treatment outside the country could cost around six million meticais.