Yolandi Vermaak always loved animals growing up in South Africa.
“I longed to be a vet, but such is life – I ended up becoming a project manager instead,” Yolandi, 48, tells New Idea.
Her compassion for animals never wavered and in November 2013, when her husband Reynier, daughter Taylor, 18, and son, Aiden, 17, immigrated to Canberra, Australia, they visited a zoo at Batemans Bay in NSW.
From then on, Yolandi had a dream to care for wombats. But she never imagined they would end up helping her.
It was her fuzzy friends that Yolandi depended on for comfort when she lost Reynier to leukaemia in 2016.
“As a distraction from the crippling grief that consumed me, I turned to wombats,” Yolandi reveals. “I volunteered at sanctuaries, completed wombat…
