Under a clear Australian sky, Michael Majok Kuch stood patiently waiting to reunite with his mother. It was July 2008, and it had been two decades since he had last seen her — since he fled his burning village in southern Sudan in the middle of the night as flashes of light pierced the clouded air, his childhood suspended by a civil war he was too young to understand. Just 5 years old, he dodged death on a harrowing journey through refugee camps and across borders, on a path that brought him to the United States and to a new life.