One day two years ago, my mother came home from work and announced that she had found a pet for the family. My father, little sister, and I eyed her in doubt.

My sister asked what kind of dog it was. My mother said it was a poodle (贵宾犬) named Pepe. I couldn’t believe she wanted a poodle — especially one with such an ordinary name. But she had made up her mind. “Actually, I’m doing a co-worker a favor,” she said. “The woman who owns Pepe says he hates to be alone and needs children to play with him.”

Pepe arrived the next night. His short tail shook happily. I didn’t get very close to him, thinking he should have stayed with his previous owner. My little sister played with him until bedtime, and he would come to me and begged for more attention. I always ignored him. But no matter how I treated him, he’d always like to be with me. He has always been waiting for me at the front door at the end of the day, smiling happily. He seems to know that I will be coming home from school at that time. Every day, he asks me with his eyes to play with him or take him somewhere. At night, he will wait until I fall asleep, leave his bed by the wall heater, walk down the hall and jump onto the end of my bed.

One night, while everyone was sleeping, I was in a half dream state. My throat hurt, my eyes pained, and some animal was crying in my ear. I opened my eyes and saw fog in my room. I wondered who left the window open. Pepe cried and bit my pajama sleeve (睡衣袖). Then I woke up and realized that it wasn’t fog in my room — it was smoke.

Catia Lattouf de Arída has been using her apartment in Mexico City as a hospital and shelter for injured and abandoned hummingbirds(蜂鸟)for the last 11 years.

Hummingbirds are a very important part of Mexico’s ecosystem, but because of the ever-expanding urban landscape, they face all sorts of serious threats. That’s where 73-year-old Catia comes in. As a self-taught hummingbird caretaker, she devotes most of her free time and resources to nursing the tiny birds back to health. She has been doing it for over a decade and her home in Mexico City has become known as a hummingbird hospital.

Catia’s story as a hummingbird nurse began in 2011, at a very difficult moment in her life. She had lost her husband two years prior and she herself was battling cancer. She was walking on the street one day when she noticed a hummingbird that had suffered a serious eye injury. The kindhearted woman took it home, but she knew nothing about taking care of a bird, let alone such a tiny one. However, a veterinarian(兽医)friend encouraged her to look after the hummingbird, and that led to a life devoted to rescuing hundreds of tiny birds.

“It wrote me a new life,” Catia recently said about Gucci, the first hummingbird she ever cared for. Catia managed to nurse Gucci back to health, but she claims it was the tiny bird that saved her. She had sold her five high-end boutiques(精品店)in the city to focus on her battle with cancer and had fallen into a depression, but the hummingbird managed to pull her out of the sadness and loneliness that had taken over her life. And it was only the beginning.

Word of her success spread among Catia’s friends, and before long some of them began bringing her injured and abandoned hummingbirds.

In order to raise awareness of the difficulty of hummingbirds in Mexico, Catia started posting videos of the patients on social media and many of them spread quickly.