18/09/2018
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To my non Portuguese speaking friends, here's the translation :) :
The Portuguese who crossed half the world with 5 dogs and 8 cats
Carina Vaz Pinto was an Emirates cabin crew and a part-time dog trainer in Dubai. She left the country with 13 animals and was an odyssey to get to Príncipe Island, in São Tomé.
17/09/2018 at 20:38
By André Rito
If there is someone with flying experience is Carina Vaz Pinto. A former TAP flight attendant, she emigrated to Dubai to join Emirates and traveled the world aboard an A380. On the day she decided to change her life and leave the United Arab Emirates, the Portuguese woman, now 40, knew perfectly well what she was getting into: she wanted to get to Príncipe Island, in São Tomé, at a distance of 6 thousand kilometers , with five dogs and eight cats. Of the 600 kilos of cargo with which they traveled, half was food for the animals.
This was the turning point of a story that began much earlier when, at the age of three, she decided to blackmail her parents: "either they gave me a dog or I did not let go of my dummy," she tells NiT from Sao Tome and Principe. Lives with her partner and a few dozen animals, including dogs, cats and parrots.
"I remember going to pick him up, a great landmark in my life. He was the pet who accompanied me throughout my adolescence. A little mongrol, Flappy. I took him to school, he would wait for me at the catechesis door. "
The connection with her first dog was so strong that Carina says she felt the moment when Flappy died. "We were returning from the Algarve to Lisbon. I started crying and told my parents that I was missing him. When we arrived we realized that everything had happened at the time of my tears. I never knew the cause of death. "
Carina would later end up enroling a dog trainer course. At the time, she just wanted to learn how to deal with her Pitbull named Herby, crossed with Dogo Argentino, dog she owned already as an adult, at 30 years old. But this course proved essential, years later, when she landed for the first time in Dubai.
Faced with her daughter's sadness over the death of her first dog, her parents vowed not to have pets again, but broke the rule after a year: by Christmas they offered her a Cocker Spaniel. "It was great to date. I always had a good excuse to go for a walk with him at night and would go see my boyfriend. "
The job with TAP as a flight attendant coincided with moving out of her parents house. The family grew - though the parents had two more cockers - but since she spent a lot of time traveling, she left the dogs in the family home and started to have cats. "They are more independent and it was simpler to reconcile with my professional life. They were always at home. "
From Lisbon to Dubai
Still flying with TAP Carina started a part-time with Herbalife and eventually left the airline as the nutritional supplements company was planning to open a branch in Abu Dahbi. She said her goodbyes and through a contact of a friend left for the Middle East in 2010. "Emirates was my base. I lived next to the airport, an area that is nothing like what we imagine when we think of Dubai. I did not have the skyscrapers we see on television or the islands, my building was only eight stories high. "
For four years, she traveled through America, Australia and Europe. Herbalife, who she had left TAP for, never settled in Dubai. But the Portuguese already had other plans: she used her dog trainer course in the intervals of travel. "This is how I managed to fill my emotional need to be close to dogs," she told NiT.
From a simple idea she created a page and established as a goal to have only one customer per month. The business grew quickly: "By the end of the first year, part-time, I had trained 60 dogs. When I was not flying, I dedicated myself to animals, " she says. If she arrived at seven in the morning, that was the time she was going to train. I was consulting at my client's house.
"There are no street dogs there. People usually only buy purebred dogs. But they get bored fast, they do not know what to do with them. At six months old, the animal has not even learned the name, let alone go out for potty. And that's how I was accumulating dogs from owners who gave them up. "
She sold packages of ten classes for one thousand euros. With a basic type of training, the Portuguese became known and made good money. She was the highest paid dog trainer in Dubai and even showed on the local press.
"Customers do not want them to poo at home, not break anything, they don't want them to be dogs, basically." She came to live with twenty dogs she rescued from quitters while she did not get new owners. That's how she made the decision to leave Emirates to devote herself exclusively to her childhood passion. "I've changed my whole life."
An odyssey to Príncipe Island
"It's often said: choose a job you like and you will never work in your life again. And that happened to me " says Carina, who after a year dedicated to her new job met Stanley Cook, 36, who worked with boats and sports fishing. An artificial island was being built, where there was only sand, and Stanley, practically a stranger, challenged her to a project: to get her client's dogs to stroll the island.
"I thought it was a good marketing strategy, but I realized that it was something else," she jokes. "Who is the man who accepts a woman who lives alone with five dogs and five cats?"
They decided to take the risk: they wanted to live on the seashore, in a more isolated place, and to have a small beach bar or lodge. And the opportunity came from Príncipe Island: a beach hotel to manage, with six family tents, South African style. Problem: travel with 13 animals, four of them of potentially dangerous breeds.
Leaving them in Dubai was not an option, but the trip had everything to go wrong: right away because the airlines refused to do the transport. "We had to travel in three different ones. And always separated. We made four flights, we asked our friends for help, they also brought some cats and the goal was to get to Portugal. It would then be simpler to bring them to São Tomé, " she tels NiT.
It was necessary to have cages built to measure and on departure, in Lisbon, the couple had to separate to travel in different flights. When they landed in São Tomé, the journey still seemed far from the end: a 15-hour boat crossing to Príncipe Island, on a tour between Dubai and the African archipelago - passing through Portugal - lasted for a month. Cost: 20 thousand euros.
The couple is no longer running the beach hotel. In May this year they started a project called The Organic Rescue Homestead. The idea was to go to the Azores, always with the animals, and start a self-sustainable, tourism-oriented, guest house style project where animals rescued from the street are a fundamental part of the idea. While they do not find funding, Carina is rescuing dogs - "there are many street dogs" - and parrots.
"Principe is the last place in the world where there are large flocks of this endangered bird. It is not easy to export them from here, but they are caught and kept in terrible conditions, tied by 30-centimeter ropes. They are as intelligent as a dog. A few months ago we found three on the beach in very bad shape. One of them flew on the first day. We decided to release the others. And they keep coming back. "
Carina Vaz Pinto era assistente da Emirates e treinadora de cães em part-time, no Dubai. Saiu do país com 13 animais e foi uma odisseia para chegar à Ilha do Príncipe, em São Tomé.
