The 12-year-old behind bars in Greece after a perilous journey from Syria
As dawn broke early on Monday morning three little boats came ashore on the Greek island of Lesbos. They weren't the only ones that day - all along the shore flotillas of the desperate emerged in the morning light.
On the first boat we saw arrive a twelve-year-old boy - his glasses carefully secured with a little cable - jump into the water.
The water only reached his ankles but he clung to a rubber ring had been told might save his life if they sank and stood, disoriented, as the seventy or so migrants he had travelled with jumped to shore.
Tired and shivering he was helped by locals. There was nothing childlike about the journey he had just made by land and then sea from Syria through Turkey and into Greece.
And yet the embarrassment of youth made him giggle and wince as strangers and his family tried to get him out of his wet clothes.
The shirt was fine, there was hesitancy about the vest but when it came to his soaking trousers, well however bad his situation that wasn't being done in public and he dashed off behind a tree.
For the first time since this pale little boy got off the boat he was pink. A moment of jollity in a dire situation.
But that was probably the last moment of amusement for some time. In dry clothes Abdulsamad and his brothers set off on their journey to who knows where. They didn't, we didn't.
24 hours later, walking past the port in Myteline, I was looking through the locked gates and metal fences when I saw a familiar face peering out.
It was Abdulsamad. The pink blush when he smiled the same as that moment on the shore.
He doesn't speak English but his elder brother told me they had walked 14 hours after we'd seen them.
They'd been to a police station to hand themselves in having arrived illegally but were told to continue with their journey.
There are too many coming now to be detaining each person as in the days of old.
In the end at the port they had tried again, having slept on the street. They were taken in and locked behind the bars. Awful as it may be for them this is the only way they can get what they want.
They have to be detained to have their identities checked before they are given their six month permission to stay.
There are few advantages to being Syrian these days but in Greece at least the Syrians are given priority.
They have little food, little water and no idea where they will be taken to next. How long this little boy will remember these days.
In the coming days they will most likely be moved to the detention centre for the official fingerprinting and identity checks. Then with their paper work they will be release.
It gives the right to stay and nothing else but it is all they want now and with it they have the chance to start to build a life in country they may one day call home.