The Crowdfunding Campaign and Panetone

A crowdfunding campaign on Instagram. Surgery for “Panetone”. Pix in the description, photos of the dog, the urgency of someone who does not let go until it is solved.

Panetone is a dog — named after panetone, the sweet Christmas bread Brazilians eat by the ton in December. Someone needed to fund his surgery. The person who created the campaign posted, updated, answered every comment. A veterinarian — not the kind who finishes a shift and leaves. The kind who joins the cause, mobilizes people, and does not drop the bone.

Of course I helped. It was “Panetone” — and I love panetones and dogs.

But I have known this story from before that. Even before she became Panetone’s rescuer.

I saw her enter IFMT in 2018, the same year I started here. Not as a doctor — as a student. A teenager among so many people, asking questions in the cafeteria, sitting at the courtyard tables. Nothing special at first glance. Just another one trying to survive high school and find her own path.

Three years later, she finished high school. Took the entrance exam. Got into veterinary medicine.

Some students stick with you. You remember the name, run into them on the street one day, get news from someone. Every now and then we crossed paths around town — a “how are you?”, an “almost graduating”, an “already in the white coat?”. Always in a hurry, always with the urgency typical of that age, always figuring something out.

Today she is a licensed veterinarian. CRMV — Conselho Regional de Medicina Veterinária (Regional Veterinary Medicine Council), shifts, clinic.

But what caught me in that crowdfunding campaign was not the diploma. Diplomas we see all the time around here — students arrive, graduate, move on. What caught me was realizing she did not become just another professional. She became the kind of person who does not only take part: sometimes she is the one who mobilizes. Who leaves behind the “just make money” logic to treat emergencies for free. Who fights for a street dog, helps a hit cat, puts her face in the sun and says “let’s help”.

Every day I watch teenagers become adults in front of me. It is different, though, when someone becomes the kind of person you truly admire.

Much of who a person is comes from family and friends, in the early years of life. But year after year I see how the three years at Belão — the campus where she studied and where I work — also shape these young people. Not alone. In company. In values that catch in the air we breathe here and that stay.

That is when it clicked. IFMT is not only buildings, process, civil-service exams. It is this: people who enter at 16, 17, not quite knowing what they will become, and one day you find one of those kids around here saving the life of an animal nobody else wanted to look at.

Nobody puts that in the job posting. But it is the best part of the work.

Watching these girls and boys grow up. And especially watching them become adults you respect and admire.