According to a news report by the Los Angeles Times (LA Times), Mohamed Bzeek, 62, has buried about 10 children and is presently the sole guardian and caregiver to a bedridden six-year-old, who is blind, deaf and suffering from a rare brain defect. She has daily seizures and is paralysed in her arms and legs as well.
“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” Bzeek tells the LA Times. “I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”
Weighing just slightly over 15kg, the girl was born with an encephalocele, a rare malformation in which part of her brain protruded through an opening in her skull. Although the protruding brain tissue was removed, much of her brain remained undeveloped.
Bzeek, who has been caring for the girl since she was one month old, has taken care of three others just like her before.
“These kids, it’s a life sentence for them,” the LA Times quoted him as saying.
Bzeek, whose late wife Dawn, was a foster parent even before she married him, began fostering children with his wife in 1989. Often, the children were ill.
His first experience with the death of a foster child was gut wrenching, he told the LA Times. That child was born with a spinal disorder, wore a full body cast and was barely a year old when she died on July 4, 1991.
“This one hurt me so badly when she died,” Bzeek said, glancing at a photograph of the tiny tot lying in a coffin, in a frilly white dress.
Bzeek and Dawn made the decision to specifically care for terminally ill children in the mid-1990s and soon were fostering a boy with short-gut syndrome who could never eat solid food and was hospitalised 167 times when he was eight years old.
Another child lived only eight days after she was brought home and was so tiny, her coffin was the size of a shoe box.
“The key is, you have to love them like your own. I know they are sick. I know they are going to die. I do my best as a human being and leave the rest to God.”
Bzeeks’ only biological son, Adam, now 19, was born with brittle bone disease and dwarfism. But taking things in stride, Bzeek said of his son, “That’s the way God created him.”
Adam, who weighs just 29kg, studies computer science at Citrus College, and drives an electric wheelchair to class.
Last December, Bzeek, Adam and his foster daughter’s day nurse Marilou Terry, celebrated the girl’s sixth birthday.
“Yay!” Bzeek told his foster daughter, despite the girl’s inability to hear him. “You are 6! 6! 6!,” he said, holding her close to his heart.
For the full article, read : ‘I know they are going to die.’ This foster father takes in only terminally ill children