【推荐1】Dr. Kwane Stewart has been working overtime. When his workday ends, the San Diego-based veterinarian does not stop caring for animals. Stewart, who has been a vet for over 20 years, has developed a passion for helping the homeless and their pets. And a few years ago, he found himself stopping to treat pets living on the street.

As he walked on the streets of San Diego, Stewart would stop to give free check-ups to homeless people’s pets. “A quick check-up, maybe some medicine or food... it isn’t a lot but sometimes giving a little can make all the difference,” says Stewart.

Word about his mission to help animals spread, and he ended up getting his own reality TV show, which follows him to other cities in California, where he provides free treatment for the pets he sees on the streets.

With his show, the Street Vet, which is shown on Canada’s Cottage TV, Stewart hopes to “raise awareness and encourage others to give a little back, too.” But despite the widespread attention, his mission does face some challenges.

“Some of the pets I come across need treatment (life-saving in some cases) that can be very costly and it’s hard to ever say no to a pet that is suffering,” Stewart explains on GoFundMe page he created to help raise money for these animals.

The money raised could go to minor treatments, like ear infections, which can be around US$100, or more serious cases like a tumor (肿瘤) removal, which can be up to US$1, 500. “All donations will go to the care of these pets and will surely make a difference in the owners' lives as well,” Stewart writes.

He started a story about one dog he treats named Dinker, who has a rare condition that will require surgery. Stewart and the pup’s owner, Walter, are trying to make the procedure happen, but it’s very expensive. With over US$ 60, 000 raised so far, Stewart hopes to soon help Dinker and other homeless pets just like him get the treatment they need.

“Working on the streets, I’ve experienced some of the most genuine stories of love, compassion, struggle and hope,” he says. “It’s been life-changing and truly inspiring.”

【推荐2】Seventy-year-old Tububatu and his wife live in a village on the edge of Badain Jaran China’s third-largest desert. Since their retirement, they’ve been spending every day fighting the advancement of the desert with the help of plant-life. Others had tried fighting the desert and failed, but they just wanted to know if they could make a difference.

Relying only on their pensions, the retired couple have been slowly and steadily growing their little desert forest. They started out by planting just 50 trees, but kept doubling their efforts to the point where they now plant thousands of trees a year. Even though they mostly plant drought-resistant (抗旱的) species, they still water them at least once a day to make sure they grow better. Their small desert forest now covers over 266 hectares (公顷) and numbers tens of thousands of trees.

The couple stay behind in their village, nearly 100 kilometers away from the nearest town, despite their children’s efforts to get them to move with them to a more comfortable home. They’ve been made fun of by other villagers who believed their efforts to fight the desert were sure to fail, but they haven’t let that prevent them making their efforts. They may very well fail, but at least they’ve given it their all.

Over the last 19 years, the couple have planted over 266 hectares of desert and have no plan of stopping anytime soon. China Daily reports that Tububatu and his wife have so far planted over 70,000 trees and spent more than 1 million yuan of their savings in the process. The bad conditions have caused a lot of damage to their health. They look older than their age, and they both have been battling serious health conditions, but they refuse to abandon their battle against the desert.

【推荐3】Every June, we have a tradition at our house. Our children are given bowls and asked to collect pieces of summer nature. They leave those bowls on the front doorstep and we go for a walk. When we return, we find fairies (仙女) have transformed the bowls’ contents into ice cream.

“When are the fairies coming?” Six-year-old Anna had been asking last June with expectation. Meanwhile, Joshua, nine, was getting wise to fairies and such silly things. As the evening arrived, the children collected leaves, grass and dead insects. We put their bowls on the front doorstep and we were on our walk. After a while, I said that I had forgotten my keys and needed to go back, but then I said I found them. Joshua smiled knowingly, and then was beginning to get a bit confused.

Back near our house, I warned that the fairies might not have arrived—we might need to walk a bit longer. Joshua seemed relieved. “Yes,” he said, “they probably hadn’t come.” Yet when we reached the front door, the bowls were in the same place we had left them—filled with ice cream.

Anna accepted all this with complete innocence. She felt happy, excited and eager to eat. But Joshua was astonished, speechless. He looked up at me, at his dad, then gazed around the neighborhood in amazement. “The fairies must have come,” he whispered as we all sat down to feast. “But was this really magic?”

I kissed Anna and Joshua good night, but at 2:00 a. m., Joshua crawled into bed next to me, whispering, “Mummy, how did you do it?”

I told my nine-year-old boy the truth. I had asked a neighbor to help us. Shortly after we left on our walk, she had slid over to our house and switched the bowls. Joshua smiled in relief and thanked me for telling him. Then he fell asleep. Just at that moment, I believed in magic, too.

【推荐1】“When one door of happiness closes, another opens. ”

“The best and most beautiful things in the world must be felt with the heart. ”

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. ”

Who will you think of when hearing these inspirational sayings? People consider deafness, blindness, and other disabilities as weaknesses but that is not often the case, and it certainly wasn’t the case for Helen Keller. When she was a child, she was described as a “Monster” by her family members, because she would lose her temper at any time, and always behave at will. All of that changed within a year and she transformed fully. She became one of the greatest inspirations that the world has ever seen, because she didn’t just change herself, even others.

This famous American author, was born on June 27th, 1880, in Alabama, America. She was born normal, with normal sight and hearing abilities. His father Arthur was a soldier of the Civil War. All was good until Helen had a rare disease called “Brain Fever”. She recovered from the disease but at the cost of her sight and hearing abilities.

This did not stop her from the amazing accomplishments she would achieve. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan helped her and made her increase the ability to communicate properly so that Helen graduated from college in 1904 and won many awards. She became one of the best humanitarians the world has seen, along with becoming the founder of the ACLU. Among her most famous books is The Story of My Life, The World I Live In, and The Open Door.

【推荐2】Canadian author Alice Munro, a master of the contemporary short story, passed away on May 13, 2024, at 92.

Munro’s texts featured depictions of everyday but decisive events, pulling vast themes out of ordinary settings. Her characters often mirrored her own rural Ontario lifestyle. In an interview after winning the Nobel Prize, she said that living in a small town gave her the freedom to write. “I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a city, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level,” she said. “As far as I knew, at least for a while, I was the only person I knew who wrote stories.”

Munro’s first short story was published when she was 37, a college dropout squeezing in writing time around her children’s naps. By the time she was in her 60s, she had become one of the most celebrated short-story writers in the world. Throughout her long career, she hardly ever failed to wow readers and critics with her quietly powerful language. In reviewing her last collection, Dear Life, NPR critic Alan Cheuse wrote “A Munro story gives us so much life within the bounds of a single tale that it nourishes (滋养) us almost as much as a novel does.”

In a literary culture that tends to celebrate novels over shorter fiction, Munro has been a constant advocate for the power of the short story. In the interview, Munro emphasized the significance of her win not for herself, but for her art form: “I really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you play around with until you get a novel written.”

When asked “Do you want young women to be inspired by your books and feel inspired to write?” Munro replied, “I don’t care about that. I want people to find not so much inspiration as great joy. I want them to think of my books as related to their own lives in ways.”

【推荐3】Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a name that every lover of English literature will always remember and cherish. He is the pen father of the extraordinary detective Sherlock Holmes and a number of detective stories.

Arthur chose to go to medical field and become a surgeon from the University of Edinburgh, and this is the place where Arthur met a person who influenced him to become a writer. It was one of his teachers Dr. Joseph Bell who was master at observation, logic, detection and diagnosis. All these qualities were later found in the character of the celebrated detective Sherlock Holmes.

1888 was a significant year that rocketed Doyle to fame with his novel which was named as ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in which he introduced his two immortal characters—Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. The story ‘The Sign of Four’ was instrumental in establishing Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle in literature.

The writer tried to open a practice in Paris but not a single patient came to him, which proved to be a blessing in disguise. It gave him a lot of time to think. And it was here that he met an illustrator named Sydney Paget who created the image of Sherlock Holmes which captured the minds of the readers and made the detective famous all over.

Doyle’s next creation was the delightfully violent Professor Challenger. ‘The Lost World’ which involved Professor Challenger was an immediate success.

Finally, because of his wife’s illness, Doyle decided to devote his life to his previous work rather than writing. This was the time when he decided to end the stories of Sherlock Holmes, which he did in ‘The Final Problem’.

The great Arthur Conan Doyle died at the age of 71 in 1930. He has left a legacy (遗产) to last us a lifetime and is still alive through his books and stories.