Travel tip: try planets.

Sorry to break in with this on a very much Sherlock-only kind of blog- I promise not to make a regular thing of this, but this is something that’s happened TWICE now. 

This is Beyli. He’s a two-month old foal and he’s adorable. He belongs to a friend of the family. 

So adorable, in fact, that a member of the public spent a nice afternoon feeding him. You feed the ducks and that’s ok. right? It’s a nice thing to do. 

They fed him turnip. He choked and gave himself a stomachache as a result.

The problem is that horses can’t really burp and horses can’t vomit. Their digestive systems are fine-tuned and when they go wrong, they go really wrong. Colic in horses is difficult to treat and in Beyli’s case, like many others, proved to be insurmountable. With pain medicine not working, after 4 hours of doing their best with no improvement, the vet called time on his suffering rather than let him go on to a very slow and painful end. 

A horse needlessly suffered and died because someone fed him the wrong thing. They weren’t necessarily malicious, they were just hugely ignorant. And worse, they were hugely entitled. There were already signs asking people not to feed the animals. As I said, this has now happened TWICE to the same family, and they’re by no means alone. 

PLEASE Don’t feed horses that don’t belong to you. 

Horses can have disorders, diabetes, allergies and dietry requirements and you have NO IDEA if what you’re giving them is acceptable or not. Even ‘safe’ things like carrot and apple could be ‘wrong’ for this particular horse. Grass clippings? Not okay. Grain? Not okay for a horse that hasn’t been regularly eating it. 

Don’t assume. i have seen walkers pull up random plants and offer them over the fence INCLUDING TOXIC, DEADLY weeds like ragwort. I’ve seen horses offered dog-biscuits and bread. I’ve heard of horses being regularly fed by strangers thinking they were being under-fed, when the horse in question was on a vet-given diet to control weight and other conditions. 

Don’t feed horses that don’t belong to you even little treats and things like sugar cubes because it gives them bad manners. They start biting and harassing people. It’s bad for their teeth and too much sugar is terrible for them.

In some places if the owner has liability insurance, if you can be identified, YOU will be legally responsible for the vet’s bills. And if you’re thinking ‘well, they’d never identify me’, then that’s besides the point. 

Please. You wouldn’t feed someone’s dog without asking, I hope. You definitely wouldn’t feed someone else’s child. 

TL;DR: Don’t feed other people’s horses. You can make them SERIOUSLY ill. Treat animals in fields like animals at the zoo: you’re welcome to look, but don’t meddle with their care. 

Hello, my name is Carmen (she/her). I’m 23 years old, and I need help to leave my country, Venezuela.

(Some info about myself: I have a B.Ed. in Spanish and Literature, and I’m currently working as a news editor)

The following is a lot to take in, but bare with me.

As some of you may know, Venezuela is in a deep economic, political, and humanitarian crisis due to the low oil prices, the devaluation of out currency and a corrupt government that doesn’t know how to handle the nation.

Right now Vzla is the country with the highest inflation rate in the world: 1369% (hyperinflation).

Our currency, the bolívar fuerte, is practically worthless. Here, one (1) dollar is worth around 100.000 Bs. f. the minimum wage is 456.507 Bs. f. a month. I, a full time worker (8 hours per day), make less than 5 dollars a month.

Because the national production is dead, almost everything is imported. Which means the cost of products depends on the value of the $. So basic goods can cost half your salary.

(Here some info about foreign currency regulations and price controls in Venezuela)

Some prices (12/11/2017):

(I know, it’s RIDICULOUS)

All of this, of course, increases the violence, insecurity and corruption rates as well. Caracas (our capital), Valencia and Maturín made it to the top 10 “most violent cities in the world”. Cumaná (Where I live) is number 24.

Basically, you can’t own anything without being at risk of getting robbed/kidnaped/killed, you can’t save money because the devaluation/inflation moves too fast, you can’t eat well because you can’t afford it, you can’t get sick because there’s no medicine and hospitals are in shambles.

We literally don’t even have cash, because we need too many bills to buy anything and the demand is too high.

You can’t live here, period.

A lot of venezuelans are leaving the country everyday to anywhere really, but as the time goes by it gets harder to get out. Airlines are cutting flights and the transportation system is shutting down.

(The photo below is from the San Cristóbal terminal. A bus loads people who travel to the Colombian border. 12/07/2017)

I stayed for the longest, hopeful that maybe things would change, but nothing happened and things are just getting worse.

For that and more, I, along with two close friends, have decided to leave Venezuela and settle in Perú, to help our families from outside.

“The bolivar is so devalued that sending only a fraction of a month’s salary to a relative in Venezuela can amount to millions of bolivars. For example, the minimum wage in Peru is around US $250. If you send your relative about US $10, they would have three minimum wage monthly salaries” (x).

But before all that we need money. At least $1.500 to pay for the travel (on bus/ 4 days aprox.) and to cover the expenses of a month stay (until we stabilize) in Perú.

So, that’s it. Any little help is a lot, PLEASE SHARE.

(Because neither Paypal nor GoFundMe work in Venezuela…)

Here’s the link to my friend’s fundraiser in Generosity.

My Twitter

I’m $181 dollars away from my goal ($500). I’ll be leaving before my friends. Once there it would be easier for me to help them. 

Terra Preta soils are of pre-Columbian nature and were created by humans between 450 BCE and 950 CE. The soil’s depth can reach 2 meters, and exists in small plots averaging 20 hectares along the Amazon river. It was made by adding a mixture of charcoal, bone, and manure to infertile soils, making them ideal for agriculture, and it can even renew itself slowly thanks to all the microorganisms living in it.

It’s such a rich soil that researchers are trying to recreate it on a larger scale and include it in modern agriculture practices.

Chinampas. 

It gets my horticulture loving plant nerd ass going, let me tell you. 

Also if you want an excellent source for de-desertification here’s a documentary for you. 

In the seventh grade, Katie Yamasaki’s teacher denied that the Japanese American incarceration during World War II ever happened. Outside of class, her classmates often made slanted-eye and karate-chopping gestures at her. On her younger sister’s first day of school, a boy exclaimed, “I don’t want to sit by no Jap.”

As a middle schooler, Yamasaki faced similar prejudice to what her Japanese American grandparents’ families experienced more than 40 years before. When the government evicted more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Yamasakis and their extended family, including her grandmother’s sister and parents and her grandfather’s family, were placed in the Tule Lake, Manzanar, and Amache concentration camps. Many Japanese American citizens lost their homes and personal belongings when they were forced into these camps, and when they returned after the war, they continued to suffer from hate crimes both insidious and violent.

Flash forward 80 years, and Yamasaki’s family story is now taught in fourth grade classrooms. Her children’s book, Fish for Jimmy, which is included in McGraw-Hill’s latest fourth grade anthology textbook, teaches a fictionalized account from her grandfather’s uncle’s internment experience. Jimmy, having lost his appetite after his father was taken away by the FBI, finds his strength again after brother Taro sneaks out of Manzanar to catch fish for him.

Yamasaki, 41, has spent the last 15 years creating art that honors her family’s incarceration experience by reflecting on contemporary civil liberties issues like wrongful imprisonment of women and people of color. Her murals are seen outside museums, women’s prisons, mental health centers, and elementary schools around the world, from Detroit to Cosquín, Argentina, to Chiapas, Mexico.