Elisabeth Belous is 27, Ukrainian, but born in Lünen, Germany where after the collapse of the Soviet Union her parents had immigrated, looking for work opportunities and a place to raise a family. In 2004, when she was nine, the family moved to Sacramento, California to be with extended family members who had moved there as refugees in the early 1990s and where her parents found further work opportunities. But in 2007, her parents moved Elisabeth and her brother again, this time to Portugal, to work as missionaries on behalf of the Evangelical church. In recent years, she has been living in Portugal as a single mother, her parents having moved back to the US, and just in the last month, members of Elisabeth’s family fled the  war in the Ukraine, arriving in Portugal where they now live with Elisabeth and her young son.