Hello, please could you translate this message? If you can’t read it, it’s in Spanish. Thank you for your attention.

Hello, my name is Gabriela Urdaneta and I am organising this fundraiser on behalf of my Venezuelan friend Moises Torreala, who has a tortoise called Angelita. Unfortunately, he is currently unemployed and does not have enough money to pay the vet, so this little friend’s days have been filled with suffering. After Angelita was run over by the neighbour’s car while she was out walking one night, here is what my friend Moises told me about what happened.

‘Last night I went to bed late, at about three in the morning (3 a.m.), waiting for the neighbour’s car to arrive, and just in case a second car came along, because sometimes they send two cars, but the timing is predictable. When I saw the neighbour’s car arrive, I waited an hour and didn’t see the second car turn up, so I assumed it wasn’t coming. I was a bit of an idiot, and this really was my fault, because if a second car had arrived and as I’d gone to bed late, it was obvious I’d wake up late. So I did wake up late, and when I got up to see if a second car had come, there was only my neighbour’s car there, and obviously I didn’t see a second car because they’d taken it away. But whilst I was asleep, from about nine o’clock, I suppose the tortoise got in the way of the second car and, as the man is a bit of a scatterbrain, he didn’t see it. And Mum says it was just a brush, but that’s a lie; it wasn’t a brush – that car ran over the tortoise, one of the wheels went over it, and when the bloke felt his car lifting up, he obviously said, ‘Something’s going on here,’ so he put his foot down again, got out, saw what had happened, got scared, called a bunch of neighbours to help him sort this out, which ties in with what my other neighbour told me: that there were people at my house at nine in the morning, and what they did was move the injured tortoise to the back of the garden so it would look like it just happened by chance – it was in the garden and something happened, God knows what happened and so on. They got scared, everyone went home and that was that. I got up at eleven and didn’t even know what had happened, and I didn’t even know that had happened because there was no second car, so I assumed Angelita was fine, (the tortoise is called Angelita). When my mum arrived, she went into the garden and the first thing she saw was the tortoise lying on the ground with its shell open. And we started drawing our own conclusions.”

That was the story told by my friend just a few minutes ago via an audio message and a phone call, along with some photos to confirm the condition of Angelita the tortoise. According to my friend, when his father gave her to him, it was to raise her so she could serve as food in an emergency, but in the end the tortoise became part of Moises’s family, being more than a pet, being a life companion who has been there in his toughest moments and showing more humanity than many people he has met throughout his life. Right now, as you read this, Angelita is lying down, resting and enduring the pain of her injuries caused by a moment of inattention on the part of both Moises and the driver, who failed to check before setting off, and by the neighbours’ lack of maturity in refusing to take responsibility and offer help for what happened, They simply want to hide the facts of their wrongdoing, whilst Moises desperately pleads for help to save his friend. Please help us save this tortoise, who does not deserve to suffer but finds herself in such a precarious situation due to an oversight. If not to pay for the vet, then at least to give her a peaceful rest in her final moments of life.