This foster father has taken care of more than 40 terminally ill children

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last updated 17 February 2017

For more than two decades, Mohamed Bzeek has opened his home to terminally ill foster children, ensuring they spend their final days knowing they are loved.

"It's my faith," he told ABC Los Angeles. "I take those kids. I know they need somebody. I know there is not many people for them." Bzeek came to the U.S. from Libya in 1978, and his late wife suggested they become foster parents in 1989; six years later, they started taking care of terminally ill kids, and Bzeek has been a foster father to more than 40 dying children. "They put them in a facility or send them to the hospital," he said. "They never have family. I will take them and they have family, and when they die, they die with their family."

Bzeek is known in L.A. County as being the only foster parent who solely takes in terminally ill children, and some only survived a few days after moving in. He has one biological son, 19-year-old college student Adam, who was born with brittle bone disease and dwarfism. He was taught early on about his foster siblings and their ailments, and he is a doting big brother to a 6-year-old girl who is blind, deaf, and has little brain function due to a rare defect. She requires 24-hour care, and while Mohamed Bzeek knows she can't hear or see, "I always talk to her," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I'm always holding her, playing with her, touching her.... She has feelings. She has a soul. She's a human being."