Raffiullah doesn't know his birthday. He has never heard of McDonalds. And he has only seen a television once, when passing through the city of Jalalabad fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The boy has been living in New Shamshatoo Refugee Camp outside Pakistan's Frontier City of Peshawar for the last 18 months. He thinks he is 11 years old but isn't sure. "None of the children in the camp know when they were born," he explained.
Raffiullah is one of hundreds of thousands of displaced young Afghans living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps in Pakistan. They are the forgotten children of the various wars that have ravaged their country. In the coming weeks, they will be joined by thousands of other children escaping Afghanistan with their families from the bombs, drought and famine.
We met Raffiullah and a group of about 20 children at the entrance to the New Shamshatoo camp, which is accessed by a long, winding dust track. This camp is home to 70,000 Afghan refugees who have arrived in the last two years.
The Afghan Refugee Commissariat gave permission to journalists to visit only in the last few days. The Commissariat claims it is planning to open a hundred new emergency camps to cope with the additional one million refugees expected to flee Afghanistan.
Scores of children rushed towards us when we arrived, but shaven-headed and dirty-faced Raffiullah caught our attention. It was the proud way he held his head and the determination in his dark eyes that made him stand out.
Raffiullah's story is typical of most families here. He was living with his parents, two brothers and sister in the village of Karabagh, near Kabul, when his life was shattered last year.
"Our house was destroyed one day by the Taliban and we had to leave. We left all our possessions behind." The family walked the 30 km to Kabul and then made their way to Pakistan by bus, a journey that took many days.
There is nothing to differentiate Raffiullah's hut from the thousands of others.
"Our house is known as number 50 because that is our number on the food rations list," he said.
The house is one room measuring about 10 feet by 12. There is no furniture and the walls and floors are bare. The beds are two mats rolled to the side during the daytime. The four children sleep on one and the parents on another. Pots and pans are kept in the corner of the room and all the cooking is done over a fire outside. The family's possessions are stored in plastic bags hanging from the ceiling. There is not one toy in sight.
One of the bags contained Raffiullahs schoolbooks. He takes it down and eagerly shows us his maths workbook, his English book, and his Koran workbook. The Koran, he says, is his favourite subject and he tells us he prays five times every day.
Raffiullah and his family are often hungry. There is never fresh fruit, milk, or meat. Their diet consists mainly of bread, baked by his mother with wheat rations and oil distributed every month. "There is not enough food and there is a lot of disease. I don't like it here and wait for the day I can go home," Raffiullah said.
Today Raffiullah is minding his sister, Mazlooma, who is around four years old. She is extremely pretty and sits quietly on the window ledge. His parents and two brothers are at the food distribution centre for the monthly handout of rations by the UNHCR. Each person gets 14 kilos of flour, 750 grams of edible oil and 1 kg of pulses for the month.
"My father is not well. He was injured and beaten by the Taliban and he is not able to do hard work so we have to live on our rations."
Raffiullah is lucky in that he is getting some sort of education. He attends the Omer Ben Abdul Aziz School, at the edge of the camp. He knows there is a new war in Afghanistan.
"I want to see peace in my homeland. I want to go back some day. We were well off there. We had food and clothes and many rooms in our house. Here there is disease and hunger. The heat is unbearable. I pray every day for peace so we can go home." He says when he grows up he will join the jihad. "I don't want to fight my countrymen but I will fight any foreigners at war with our country."
The UNICEF representative in Pakistan, Ms Carroll Long, told The Irish Times there was huge concern for the plight of the thousands of Afghan refugee children in Pakistan. Many are living in desperate conditions in camps in the country, receiving no education or stimulation.
"Afghan children are malnourished, bare footed and lack warm clothing. These children could be frozen to death within six weeks if nothing is done to save them," she said.