[Vision2020] The Penguin and the Fisherman

[Nicholas Gier]

*Today’s most heartwarming story is brought to you from a beach in Brazil.
It’s the story of a South American Magellanic penguin who swims 5,000 miles
each year to be reunited with the man who saved his life.*



*Retired bricklayer and part time fisherman Joao Pereira de Souza, 71, who
lives in an island village just outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, found the
tiny penguin, covered in oil and close to death, lying on rocks on his
local beach in 2011. Joao cleaned the oil off the penguin’s feathers and
fed him a daily diet of fish to build his strength. He named him Dindim.*



The prodigal penguin returns (Picture: TV Globo)



*After a week, he tried to release the penguin back into the sea. But, the
bird wouldn’t leave. ‘He stayed with me for 11 months and then, just after
he changed his coat with new feathers, he disappeared,’ Joao recalls. And,
just a few months later, Dindim was back. He spotted the fisherman on the
beach one day and followed him home.*



Look who’s back (Picture: TV Globo)



*For the past five years, Dindim has spent eight months of the year with
Joao and is believed to spend the rest of the time breeding off the coast
of Argentina and Chile. It’s thought he swims up to 5,000 miles each year
to be reunited with the man who saved his life.*



(Picture: Rio de Janeiro Federal University)



*‘I love the penguin like it’s my own child and I believe the penguin loves
me,’ Joao told Globo TV. ‘No one else is allowed to touch him. He pecks
them if they do. He lays on my lap, lets me give him showers, allows me to
feed him sardines and to pick him up.'*



It’s thought Dindim believes the fisherman is also a penguin (Picture: TV
Globo)



*‘Everyone said he wouldn’t return but he has been coming back to visit me
for the past four years. He arrives in June and leaves to go home in
February and every year he becomes more affectionate as he appears even
happier to see me.’*



(Picture: Rio de Janeiro Federal University )



*Biologist Professor Krajewski, who interviewed the fisherman for Globo TV,
told* *The Independent*
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/meet-dindim-the-penguin-who-returns-to-his-human-soulmate-every-year-a6917621.html>
 *: ‘I have never seen anything like this before. I think the penguin
believes Joao is part of his family and probably a penguin as well. ‘When
he sees him he wags his tail like a dog and honks with delight. And, just
like that, the world seems a kinder place again.'*































-- 

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they
shall never sit in.

-Greek proverb

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not in
lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without
guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your own
understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.

--Immanuel Kant
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