In all the vastness of Los Angeles County, there’s only one foster parent who takes in terminally ill children. Meet Mohamed Bzeek, a kindly, portly man with a long beard. He came to the United States from Libya back in 1978 when he was a college student. A few years later, he met and married Dawn, a woman who had already opened her home to foster children. They continued hosting foster children, including some who were seriously ill. They eventually decided to specialize in hosting terminally ill children with do-not-resuscitate orders because nobody else would take them in.
As Bzeek himself explains, “Nobody wants to deal with death, you know. So these kids, if we don’t take them, they are going to stay in a hospital or a facility. There is no bond, nobody holding them, nobody to talk to them. I always talk with my kids, doesn’t matter if they’re blind or deaf, I always talk to them because I believe they’re a human being; they have a soul; they have feelings.”
Bzeek’s own son was born with dwarfism and brittle bone disease, so fragile that changing his socks risked breaking bones. But today, the boy is a 19-year-old computer science student. He gets to class in an electric wheelchair and gets around the house on a kind of body skateboard his father made for him.
Bzeek had a health crisis of his own, and as he recalled, “I was so scared. I felt what the kids felt. They’re alone by themselves. This makes me do more for these kids because I was in their shoes.” We’ve posted the full interview with this amazing man below. You won’t want to miss it.
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