Growing up in South Africa, 49-year-old Yolandi Vermaak had always loved animals. “I longed to be a vet, but such is life, I ended up becoming a project manager instead,” she tells WHO.
Her compassion for animals never wavered and in 2013, when her husband Reynier, daughter Kaylor, now 19, and son, Aiden, now 18, emigrated to Canberra, Australia, she got to hold a wombat joey at a zoo in Batemans Bay, NSW. Yolandi was immediately enamoured with the grunting, bulky-framed creature.
From then on, Yolandi had a dream to care for wombats. But in a cruel twist of fate, she never imagined that after heartbreakingly losing her beloved husband Reynier to leukaemia in 2016, the animals she loved would help her overcome her grief and heal.
“As a distraction…
