There is a massive swathe of land surrounding the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Explosion. This area consists of the abandoned cities, villages, and natural areas adjacent to Chernobyl and within sight of its danger.

Enter the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Walking into the closest approximation of a post-apocalyptic setting on earth can be a jarring moment, especially for visitors to the region not really understanding what they are stepping into. For one group of people, the workers and security guards of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, this apocalyptic setting would transform into something akin to a home thanks to newfound friends of the furry sort, dogs.

Stray Dogs of Chernobyl and the Guards Who Love Them

Consider your day-to-day operations at the office. No matter what you feel about your day or your duties, you likely aren’t surrounded by the remains of a giant nuclear wasteland. Working in the Exclusion Zone surrounding the infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is more than just a job, it’s a way of life and one that is being studied by the University of Cambridge.

Jonathon Turnbull is a PhD Candidate for the Department of Geography at Cambridge. For his project, he would give disposable cameras to checkpoint guards working throughout the Exclusion Zone, as well as various workers running shops and convenience stores in the area. Turnbull’s goal was simple, to allow these people to capture their daily life and to reflect upon it during an interview at a later date.

Turnbull lives in Kyiv where he operates as a geographer, studying human and animal relations emerging from the CEZ. Turnbull’s work would lead him to utilize photovoice and photo-elicitation techniques, inviting his subjects to tell their stories while photographs are carefully inserted into the conversation to evoke more information, deeper memories, and stronger feelings.

Meet the Chernobyl Puppies

In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, an area covering roughly,4200km2 between Ukraine and Belarus has been reclaimed by nature. A wildlife haven according to some researchers, this Exclusion Zone would become a haven for stray dogs known as the Chernobyl Puppies. These domestic animals were largely left behind by soldiers to prevent contamination during the initial event, instead left to their own devices to breed in the wild.

Chernobyl Puppies have an average lifespan of just five years and this is due to a few surprising consequences. First and foremost, hunger and thirst are the leading causes of death for these dogs followed by the harsh and cold winters of Ukraine. Radiation is last on the list. At the time of this writing, Turnbull’s study suggests that there are more than 500 dogs throughout the Zone, considered descendants of the dogs left behind on the infamous date in 1986.

While the dogs that can be found around the Power Plant are easy enough to label as strays, the guards of Chernobyl wouldn’t dare to call them as such. Turnbull noted that his interviews left him with the impression that the guards felt a sense of ‘ownership’ over the dogs, including feeling compelled to care for them with food, medicine, and human contact. In return, Turnbull suggests that the dogs provide entertainment, protection, and comfort of their own. One guard said, “We pull out ticks and even buy injections for rabies.”

As the guards and puppies of Chernobyl grow more comfortable with one another, they provide a stark counterpoint to the longevity of damage that Chernobyl has caused. While dogs and humans have begun to come together in the area, the land within the Zone will remain uninhabitable for more than 20,000 years.

Carrie Hannah is the director at Delmar College of Hair and Esthetics, located in Alberta, Canada. A haircare professional with years of experience under her belt as an instructor, Hannah had grown accustomed to teaching even the most unusual of students the skills they would need to succeed in the hair, makeup, and beauty world. With that being said, even Carrie was surprised when she met with an elderly man at her school who had wished to learn a few things in the field. His reasoning? Well, that’s the reason for today’s story.

Let’s leap into one of the most touching beauty school stories you’ll ever read!

Helping Hands For Those We Love

There are few things in life more important than taking care of and providing care to the ones that we love. When we stand before our significant other and bind ourselves together in marriage, we truly hope to embrace ‘TIl Death Do Us Part’ in the same way that our story’s subject has.

Carrie Hannah had been preparing for classes with her students as if it were any other day when she was approached by a white-haired, elderly man. The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, would introduce himself to Carrie before getting into the reason for their meeting — the elderly man had wanted to help his wife with her makeup.

According to Carrie, the elderly man explained that his wife had been struggling with her vision as she grew older. As she struggled to see, her beauty routine became more of a chore. His wife was struggling to curl her hair and had even burned herself in the process. Her husband wanted to help, but he didn’t know exactly how, and that’s where our two protagonists came together.

Carrie would go on to say that the man “genuinely cared” about his wife and her process. Carrie would continue, “His wife always cared about her appearance, and he wanted to help.”

A New Set of Skills

With his motive explained and a spot available to him, Carrie would quickly get her new student into a class. At 79 years old, he was certainly going to be one of her most experienced students. The story would get picked up by Hair Design by Birtney and photos from the class would quickly go viral. Thousands of users would share the images and hundreds of thousands of views would quickly follow.

According to Hair Design by Britney, the man learned how to use a curler while also teaching him how to perform volume curls on shorter hair. Another point of emphasis that the teacher was sure to go over would involve the application of mascara. Of course, all of these lessons were combined with a hefty dose of safety training as they did not want to have any more burn incidents at home.

Commenters on the story would go crazy for the elderly man looking to support his wife. Comments ranged from compliments over his heart and attention to respect for his ambition to learn new skills outside his comfort zone. Another user recalled that their father had done something similar for their mother who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

According to Hannah, working with the man to help his wife would become a highlight of her more than 31-year-career in the beauty industry. Hannah says, “We needed some cheering up and he sure did it.”

There are few things in life quite as exciting as seeing a tiger up close and for the first time. Now if you are like most people, you’d rather see a tiger in a safe setting (No thank you, Joe Exotic!) and that is exactly what the Toronto Zoo offers its clients throughout the year.

The largest zoo in all of Canada, the Toronto Zoo features more than 5,000 animals across 460 different species. With millions of visitors every single year, all eyes were on the facility when the zoo announced that an endangered tiger had become pregnant.

Meet Mazy the Amur Tiger

Most major zoos around the world are focused in some respect on the idea of conservation. The Toronto Zoo has been trying to rehabilitate Siberian Tigers, also known as Amur tigers, for years. When the zoo was visited by a male tiger named Vasili, as part of a larger conservation program, the Toronto Zoo staff held their breath.

With fewer than 500 Amur Tigers in the wild, the endangered species is still very much on the brink of extinction. Still, that doesn’t mean that things aren’t looking up. Mazy’s successful pairing with the male tiger Vasili would lead to the birth of three happy and healthy cubs. The successful birth would mark the next chapter in what has been a successful effort to bring Amur tigers back from the brink. As recently as the 1930s, there were only 20 or 30 Amur Tigers in the wild!

Rehabilitation: Back from the Brink

Dolf DeJong is the Chief Executive Officer at the Toronto Zoo. DeJong gave a statement following the successful birth of Mazy’s cubs. DeJong would say, “This birth is an important contribution to a genetically healthy (Amur) tiger population.”

DeJong would go on to explain that Amur tigers have been facing increased pressure due in large part to illegal poaching and destructive habitat loss. These two metics combined have created a very real concern for the end of the population, despite positive population growth in recent years. DeJong believes that the most important step going forward is to educate the public on the plight of these creatures while mitigating whatever physical threats they may face.

All About the Amur Tiger

Siberian Tigers are native to Korea, Northeast China, and throughout the far east of Russia. These big cats are considered a close relation to Caspian Tigers and their large size reinforces this connection. Throughout the ’80s, the average wild male Siberian tiger would weigh between 400lbs and 675lbs with even larger cats becoming targets for poachers.

What makes the Amur Tiger particularly fascinating is that it has far-ranging travel capabilities with ranges up to 620 miles. Due to their far-ranging nature and low population, it has been exceedingly difficult to maintain an accurate count of the Amur tiger population. Thankfully, there are some signs in the wild that nature is recovering. Early in 2014, the World Wild Fund For Nature would capture on video a wild tigress with her cubs.

As far as mating is concerned, Siberian tigers will spend between five and six days with their mate. Gestation lasts nearly 3.5 months with litter sizes rarely exceeding six cubs. Cubs are originally born blind and t hey are sheltered within a den while the tigress hunts for food. The average lifespan of these gorgeous big cats ranges between 10 and 18 years depending on habitat and captivity. Captive Amur Tigers may live upwards of 25 years.

Many assume by the time they have reached their 50s or 60s the window for falling in love again has passed, and the rest of life is likely to be spent with friends and family but a close relationship is probably unlikely. Then, there is Bill Biega and Iris Ivers. These two folks, both in their 90s, decided with the world falling apart due to a pandemic that 2020 was a great year to fall in love.

Pushed Together by Circumstances

Bill and Iris weren’t strangers meeting by chance; they had been regular friends for a long time prior to 2020 arriving. However, when the pandemic arrived in March of the same year, the two of them found their situation basically locked up and restricted in their retirement community. Everyone was in a separate apartment in their Freehold complex, but Bill and Iris figured out pretty quick personal separation probably wasn’t going to work well for their friendship. No surprise, they started acting like a bunch of teenagers, sneaking back and forth to connect until a security guard caught Bill “red-handed” in one of his clandestine trips.

Confronting both Bill and Iris together, the guard drew the line in the sand that actually pushed the two seniors to making a choice. The whole community had a pretty good idea what was going on with the two of them, so they had to decide whether they would shack up for real or just stay apart for the rest of the year. It was a pretty quick discussion; Iris loaded everything into a suitcase and moved into Bill’s home in less than 24 hours.

Moving in Closer

A year later the two of them are happily together, and Bill and Iris are fully protected from COVID with their vaccinations in place and completed. Their community has changed for the better with the social restrictions lessened, but that hasn’t stopped Bill and Iris from staying close and keeping their arrangement in place. In fact, it has all brought the couple even closer. It’s a cozy place; the apartment was generally a one-bedroom and just enough for two people. Of course, it also helps that the two can actually get out more and move around, socialize and travel now versus how things were during the social lockdown.

Life has not been bad for the two. Homemade couples’ dinners, wine on a steady supply since Bill orders it by the case, lots of time to read and discuss news and history, and still enjoy life being healthy and happy has worked out just fine for Bill and Iris. They still stay connected with their family and relatives, as well as friends in the retirement community. Neither expected in their 90s that love would happen again, but it did. Leave it to a pandemic for Bill and Iris to find love in the time of Coronavirus.

When Kayla Dillard and her daughter went gathered with their troop to sell Girl Scout Cookies, they had no idea what was in store for them. If you only have a brief understanding of the Girl Scouts, you likely know that they are revered for the delicious snacks sold outside of stores and parking lots every year. One mystery man in Greenville, South Carolina, apparently loved the cookies so much that he decided to buy the entire stock from Dillard and her troop. This heartwarming story had a rather mysterious ending, however, with nobody knowing who the man was.

Let’s peel this story back and start from the beginning, and maybe we’ll learn more about the mysterious hero!

Troop 1574: Selling Cookies to Make a Difference

Kayla Dillard manages the cookie sales offered by Troop 1574. As part of her job, Dillard helps the scouts to advertise their cookies while making sales, using the received money to further support the troop. Dillard had been managing the station on a regular Friday night when a mystery man approached the table. Dillard relayed the story on social media at a later time saying, “This man purchased seven packs of cookies and gave the girls $40 and said to keep the change.”

A large order and not at all out of the ordinary, Dillard thought that she had made a great sale to a kind soul. Little did she know, the night was only getting started. The man would return shortly after making his first purchase before telling the troop, “Pack up all of your cookies – I’m taking them!”

According to Dillard, the man had wanted to help the troop while also getting the kids out of the cold. Apparently, the weather was bitter and cold, leaving the troop more than a little uncomfortable. Needless to say, the entire troop was ecstatic when they heard that their mystery buyer was taking the rest of the lot. Dillard would go on to say of the mystery buyer, “$540 he spent on cookies. What an amazing soul!!!!”

Despite the story going viral, Dillard and her scout troop have been unable to identify the man. Numerous reporters and local news agencies have tried to contact the mystery buyer in order to highlight his story. As it turns out, this is one hero who has decided to remain unidentified.

History of the Girl Scouts

The Girl Scouts were founded by Juliette Gordon Low in 1912, during the middle of what we now call the Progressive Era. It was at this point in American history that women couldn’t vote and this was something that frustrated the nearly deaf Juliette Gordon Low to no end. In order to fight back against this oppressive, Juliette would host events with fellow women, playing games, hiking, camping, and learning about the world around them.

Juliette and her girls would learn different languages, how to lend a helping hand, and how to read the stars. Thanks to these early efforts, the Girl Scouts Club would grow by leaps and bounds over the years, potentially to a level that Juliette never could have imagined. At the time of this writing, and according to the Girl Scouts, there are more than 1.7 m million girls and 750,000 adults within the organization across 92 countries.