This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
Elizabeth Wellendorf has 38 kids.
The Catholic nurse from Omaha, Nebraska, gushes about them as any mother might: One girl is quick to laugh; another insists on a daily kiss hello; the younger ones burst with energy; the older ones are well behaved. All of them she loves.
But Elizabeth is not a mother, not in the traditional sense. Instead, the 28-year-old volunteers full-time at Hogar Niño Dios (“Home of the God Child”), a home for children with physical and mental disabilities in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus. It’s a home for those she affectionately calls “my kids.”
I first spot Elizabeth when I enter the spacious red-and-black lobby of the Dan Panorama Hotel in Jerusalem. It’s late, just past 10 p.m., on a mild winter evening. A few people chat by the low-lit bar. Relaxing instrumental music fills the quiet.
Elizabeth greets me with a warm smile when our eyes meet, even before we recognize each other. With her blonde hair and blue eyes, she’s easy to pick out. She’s on her way back to Bethlehem after spending the holidays in the States. She arrives at the hotel directly from the airport after a 30-hour journey.
But Elizabeth, I witness firsthand, is not one to think of herself. She wants to know how I’m doing. She’s good, she says. Landing at the airport by Tel Aviv was reinvigorating.
“When I touched down, it was coming home,” she says. “This is where I belong.”
Bethlehem has been her home and the Hogar her family since she began volunteering there in 2022. In the city that, 2,000 years ago, had no room at the inn for the Child Jesus, she is making room for God today. She points to the Hogar’s name, “Home of the God Child.” The religious sisters who run the home — the Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matará, established in Argentina in 1988 — see every child as the Child Jesus. She does too.
“I would love someday to be married with children,” Elizabeth tells me of her vocation. But right now, God is asking her to love “the little children that the world has forgotten.”
Some of the children come to the Hogar after being abandoned, discarded in trash cans or left in boxes outside orphanages and churches, she says. Others are brought by their families, who lack the time or the resources to care for a child with disabilities. According to a 2023 report commissioned by UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, an estimated 2.1% of the Palestinian population was reported as living with a disability in 2017: 2.6% in the Gaza Strip and 1.8% in the West Bank, which includes Bethlehem, a disputed territory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Children under 18 make up about 20% of those with disabilities.
At the Hogar, the sisters welcome all children, including children of different faiths. The majority are Muslim, Elizabeth tells me. The sisters promise them comprehensive care, including education and rehabilitation, while relying on donations — and the help of volunteers like Elizabeth.
Both are more scarce today, I learn, as Elizabeth lists their struggles during the Israel-Hamas War. She is the only full-time volunteer right now.
I want to know more, and Elizabeth is happy to tell me her story. What leads an American woman to move to the Holy Land to care for Muslim children during wartime alongside Spanish-speaking Catholic sisters?
My question is wrong, I realize. It’s not about what leads her; it’s about who guides her.
‘A slap on the head’
We sit next to each other in the lobby on one of the plush black couches lining the wall. Elizabeth provides a stark contrast in her white turtleneck sweater and pants. She leans back, relaxed. She answers my questions, one by one, with enthusiasm. I draw from her contagious energy in between her emotive hand gestures and laughs.
In an excited voice, she tells me how she came to the Hogar. She first visited the Holy Land in the summer of 2022 on a pilgrimage with Select International Tours. Her life changed during that trip, when she went to Bethlehem on June 23, her birthday. She walked through the Church of the Nativity built above the grotto, or cave, where Jesus was born. When she saw the silver star marking the spot of his birth, she kissed it.
“I heard God say, ‘Happy Birthday, Elizabeth, welcome home,'” she says. Maybe God was welcoming her to his home, the birth of her faith, she thought. But her gut told her it meant more.
That night, Select to Give Foundation, Select International’s nonprofit, gave a presentation to the group about the projects they support in the Holy Land. The last one was the Hogar. At one point, the speaker commented that “you could even volunteer here.”
“And I knew it,” Elizabeth recalls. “It was a slap on the head.”
God can be obvious sometimes, I say. Elizabeth tells me that sometimes he has to be.
“I think a lot of the time, he whispers to me, and I say, ‘That’s not you,'” she says. “So he has to yell.”
Elizabeth arrived at the Hogar in December 2022 and has stayed since — except for returning to the United States to apply for a volunteer visa. She’s not sure how long she will remain.
“This is the problem,” she smiles, her sense of humor poking through. “I said, ‘God, I’ll give you three months.’ He said, ‘OK, what about a year?'”
As Elizabeth talks about the possibility of applying for a religious visa next, I suspect the end is not in sight. Not yet.
A city full of empty inns
Bethlehem, roughly a 30-minute drive south from Jerusalem, looks different from when Elizabeth first arrived. The city, where tourism makes up 70% of its yearly income, is hurting, and with it, the Hogar. Elizabeth says that the locals were just beginning to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic when the war began Oct. 7, 2023.
She isn’t scared for herself; she’s afraid for her kids.
“I wanted to love someone that I was willing to die for, because Jesus did that for us,” she says about volunteering at the Hogar, pressing her hand to her heart. “That’s truly what I found with these kids.”
At first, that meant giving up certain comforts: eating simple foods, taking cold showers and living without central heat or air conditioning. It meant sacrificing her American salary, her culture and her language. On Oct. 7, 2023, she realized it could also mean her life.
Elizabeth speaks with me a couple of days after I visit Bethlehem with Philos Catholic, part of The Philos Project, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting positive Christian engagement in the Near East. As we enter the West Bank, cold rain taps on the bus windows. Our guide points to the rain barrels placed on rooftops to catch extra water. Rocky terrain forces us up, then down and around. Buildings of sand-colored stone clash with littered hills. A concrete wall rises up, providing a canvas for street artists.
Stores appear closed, and the ones that are open are empty. As we gather at an indoor mall, a storekeeper winds up a Nativity music box that echoes through the vacant hallways. When we visit one of the Christian souvenir stores, an elderly shopkeeper tells me he has a visa. The question is when, not if, he will leave.
For the Hogar, the war means fewer pilgrims who volunteer and donate. It also means the locals have less to share. The sisters worry about basic needs, from electricity (some of their children can’t regulate their body temperature) to water.
Each day, after reciting the Rosary, everyone at the Hogar prays for something they want, Elizabeth says. Usually, people put in requests for cheese, milk or meat. But now, on two occasions, Mother Maria Roncesvalles, the mother superior of the Hogar, has asked, “Who wants to pray for water?”
“Water,” Elizabeth emphasizes with a pause. “We did not have water coming into the house for two weeks.”
She felt concern for the kids’ immediate safety only when Iran launched rockets last year. She and a sister prepared two weeks of medicine. They picked up children from their wheelchairs and carried them, one by one, to the basement.
“My fear was that my kids can’t get downstairs,” Elizabeth says. “Who’s going to help them?”
A home away from home
Elizabeth is not much older than the Hogar. The home will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a party this summer, she says, inviting me to join. The religious family of the Incarnate Word, which includes the sisters at the Hogar, came to the Holy Land 30 years ago. When they arrived at the West Bank, they noticed a need to support children with disabilities.
These children are abandoned, locked away or treated as “something less,” Elizabeth says, becoming somber. The problem, she adds, is exacerbated by poverty and poor education.
The sisters at the Hogar are working to change this. Everyone involved — the four sisters, a handful of employees and a few volunteers — provides a home that recognizes the inherent dignity and worth of their 38 residents, who range in age from 3 to 58.
Elizabeth says people always ask if children have to leave when they reach a certain age. No, she responds, “this is their family. This is their home.”
I get a sense of the Hogar family through photos Elizabeth shares with me. In one, she helps little girls walk: One is strapped to her body, the other is in a walker, holding her hand. Another photo shows her and two kids on the floor, mid-laugh. I see a picture of Elizabeth wearing bright yellow scrubs in a room full of children, while a statue of the Child Jesus looks on from above. Each image has something in common. The people in them radiate joy.
The first time we speak, we’re in Israel. The second time, it’s remotely, over video, from our respective homes: Elizabeth in Bethlehem and me in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Even though I’m interviewing her, she starts by making sure I made it home safely.
We’re talking on a Friday, her one free day a week. On a typical day, she says, she attends Mass at the Church of the Nativity before arriving at the Hogar at 11 a.m. to help feed the children lunch and change them. By then, the children have attended school, with classes in the home. Some learn math, reading and language. Others who learn differently engage in sensory learning with lights and textures. The school also has a room for physiotherapy.
Elizabeth eats lunch with the sisters at 12:30 p.m. In the afternoon, she accompanies kids up and down the elevator, to and from hydrotherapy in the home’s mini pool. She does everything from changing and showering them to blow-drying their hair.
At 4 p.m., she helps them eat dinner and changes them again. Two hours later, they pray the Rosary. Then, it’s bedtime.
“The Palestinian Authority doesn’t help us,” Elizabeth says of the local governing body. “The Israeli government doesn’t help us. We don’t have a specific fund for our home. It’s all goodwill donations.” The sisters, she adds, trust God to provide.
A language of love
Elizabeth says she is taking classes in Arabic to learn the language of her kids. She already knows some Spanish, which she uses with the sisters. She is also fluent in the language that transcends words: love.
“A lot of my kids are nonverbal. They don’t talk. They just smile, and you love them,” she says.
These kids have changed her in a fundamental way, she says. Before, she put up a wall with patients so she wouldn’t get too attached. But these kids marched right into her heart.
She tells me about Rimas, a little girl who suffered from a chest infection. Every night, Elizabeth held her while administering breathing treatments. It would have been easier to keep Rimas in her chair, but Elizabeth wanted to give her that extra comfort.
A month and a half after Elizabeth met her, Rimas died.
“One of her last acts on this earth … was to change my heart, to open my heart,” she says.
She bursts with stories about her kids, some full of heartbreak, others full of laughter, as she speaks from the Hogar’s volunteer house, which she likens to a hostel. She’s in the living room where she can access reliable Wi-Fi. I spot two pictures next to her and ask about them. She flashes a big smile before moving her camera so I can see them up close. One is of Jesus and his Sacred Heart, the other of Mary and her Immaculate Heart.
At the Hogar, she describes a simple life where dishes are hand-washed and clothes are air-dried.
“It’s not giving up anything because I get the kids, I get the love,” Elizabeth says about being there. “I gave up the world and gained everything.”
I think of a quote she shares on her Instagram account, taken from the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”): “Man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
Elizabeth jumps into another story, prefacing it by describing a tradition of hers. Every day, she greets the Hogar’s residents by looking each of them in the eye and kissing them on the head so that they know they’re loved.
Once they were behind schedule, and she offered a quick, general hello instead. In response, Samar, a woman who is nonverbal, grabbed Elizabeth’s shirt and pulled. Elizabeth was confused until she heard Samar make kiss sounds. That’s when she realized: Samar wanted her kiss.
“That’s one of the similarities with everyone — how they’re not different from anyone else — is they just want love,” Elizabeth says. “They want to be seen.”
They can’t and don’t hide their emotions, she adds, calling it a more authentic way to live. She sees them; they see her.
“Someday I want my (own) kids — I want my (own) husband — to look at me the way these kids do,” she says. Their looks say, “Oh my gosh, you’re here. Thank you for being here. I love you.”
Little yesses
As we talk more about the Hogar, I marvel at Elizabeth’s leap of faith to come here. It sounds as simple as God asking and her saying “yes.” She stops me. Her faith — her trust in God — grew over time after giving him many little “yeses.”
“There’s been times in my life where he said, ‘Do this,’ and I said, ‘No,'” she says. “But … then I started saying ‘yes’ to the little things.”
Those little steps led her along until one day God asked her to jump. And she did, all the way to Bethlehem.
