WATAMU: A small charity on the Kenyan coast has become vital to the region’s majestic turtle population, saving thousands from poachers, fishermen’s nets and ever-worsening plastic pollution.
On the beach of the seaside town of Watamu, it takes four men to heave the huge Loggerhead sea turtle into the back of a car.
She has just been saved from a fishing tackle and will be taken to a nearby clinic to be checked for injuries, then weighed, tagged and released back into the sea.
A Kenyan NGO, Local Ocean Conservation (LOC), has been doing this work for almost three decades and has carried out some 24,000 rescues.
“Every time I release a turtle, it’s a really great joy for me. My motivation gets stronger and stronger,” said Fikiri Kiponda, 47, who has been part of LOC’s 20-odd staff for 16 years.
LOC began life in 1997 as a group of volunteers who hated seeing the creatures being eaten or dying in nets.
Turtles are still poached for their shells, meat and oil.
But through the charity’s awareness campaigns in schools and villages, “perceptions have significantly changed,” said Kiponda.
LOC, which relies mostly on donations, compensates fishermen for bringing them injured turtles.
More than 1,000 fishermen participate in the scheme and mostly do so for the sake of conservation, the charity emphasizes, since the reward does not offset the hours of lost labor.


At the NGO’s nearby clinic, health coordinator Lameck Maitha, 34, says turtles are often treated for broken bones and tumors caused by a disease called Fibropapillomatosis.
One current in-patient is Safari, a young Olive Ridley turtle around 15 years old — turtles can live beyond 100 — transported by plane from further up the coast.
She arrived in a dire state, barely alive and with a bone protruding from her flipper, which ultimately had to be amputated — likely the result of fighting to free herself from a fisherman’s net.
Safari has been recovering well and the clinic hopes she can return to the sea.
Other frequent tasks include removing barnacles that embed themselves in shells and flippers, weakening their host.
But a growing danger is plastic pollution.
If a turtle eats plastic, it can create a blockage that in turn creates gas, making the turtle float and unable to dive.
In these cases, the clinic gives the turtle laxatives to clear out its system.
“We are seeing more and more floating turtles because the ocean has so much plastic,” said Maitha.


LOC also works to protect 50 to 100 nesting sites, threatened by rising sea levels.
Turtles travel far and wide but always lay their eggs on the beach where they were born, and Watamu is one of the most popular spots.
Every three or four years, they produce hundreds of eggs, laid during multiple sessions over several months, that hatch after around 60 days.
The charity often relocates eggs that have been laid too close to the sea.
Marine biologist Joey Ngunu, LOC’s technical manager, always calls the first to appear Kevin.
“And once Kevin comes out, the rest follow,” he said with a smile, describing the slow, clumsy procession to the water, preferably at night to avoid predators as much as possible.
Only one in a thousand reaches adulthood of 20-25 years.
“Living in the sea as a turtle must be crazy. You have to face so many dangers, fish and poachers, and now human pressure with plastic and commercial fishing,” he said.
“Turtles are definitely survivors.”

VATICAN CITY: The world’s smallest country has a big budget problem.

The Vatican doesn’t tax its residents or issue bonds. It primarily finances the Catholic Church’s central government through donations that have been plunging, ticket sales for the Vatican Museums, as well as income from investments and an underperforming real estate portfolio.

The last year the Holy See published a consolidated budget, in 2022, it projected €770 million ($878 million), with the bulk paying for embassies around the world and Vatican media operations. In recent years, it hasn’t been able to cover costs.

That leaves Pope Leo XIV facing challenges to drum up the funds needed to pull his city-state out of the red.

Withering donations

Anyone can donate money to the Vatican, but the regular sources come in two main forms.

Canon law requires bishops around the world to pay an annual fee, with amounts varying and at bishops’ discretion “according to the resources of their dioceses.” US bishops contributed over one-third of the $22 million (€19.3 million) collected annually under the provision from 2021-2023, according to Vatican data.

The other main source of annual donations is more well-known to ordinary Catholics: Peter’s Pence, a special collection usually taken on the last Sunday of June. From 2021-2023, individual Catholics in the US gave an average $27 million (€23.7 million) to Peter’s Pence, more than half the global total.

American generosity hasn’t prevented overall Peter’s Pence contributions from cratering. After hitting a high of $101 million (€88.6 million) in 2006, contributions hovered around $75 million (€66.8 million) during the 2010’s then tanked to $47 million (€41.2 million) during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many churches were closed.

Donations remained low in the following years, amid revelations of the Vatican’s bungled investment in a London property, a former Harrod’s warehouse that it hoped to develop into luxury apartments. The scandal and ensuing trial confirmed that the vast majority of Peter’s Pence contributions had funded the Holy See’s budgetary shortfalls, not papal charity initiatives as many parishioners had been led to believe.

Peter’s Pence donations rose slightly in 2023 and Vatican officials expect more growth going forward, in part because there has traditionally been a bump immediately after papal elections.

New donors

The Vatican bank and the city state’s governorate, which controls the museums, also make annual contributions to the pope. As recently as a decade ago, the bank gave the pope around €55 million ($62.7 million) a year to help with the budget. But the amounts have dwindled; the bank gave nothing specifically to the pope in 2023, despite registering a net profit of €30 million ($34.2 million), according to its financial statements. The governorate’s giving has likewise dropped off.

Some Vatican officials ask how the Holy See can credibly ask donors to be more generous when its own institutions are holding back.

Leo will need to attract donations from outside the US, no small task given the different culture of philanthropy, said the Rev. Robert Gahl, director of the Church Management Program at Catholic University of America’s business school. He noted that in Europe there is much less of a tradition (and tax advantage) of individual philanthropy, with corporations and government entities doing most of the donating or allocating designated tax dollars.

Even more important is leaving behind the “mendicant mentality” of fundraising to address a particular problem, and instead encouraging Catholics to invest in the church as a project, he said.

Speaking right after Leo’s installation ceremony in St. Peter’s Square, which drew around 200,000 people, Gahl asked: “Don’t you think there were a lot of people there that would have loved to contribute to that and to the pontificate?”

In the US, donation baskets are passed around at every Sunday Mass. Not so at the Vatican.

Untapped real estate

The Vatican has 4,249 properties in Italy and 1,200 more in London, Paris, Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland. Only about one-fifth are rented at fair market value, according to the annual report from the APSA patrimony office, which manages them. Some 70 percent generate no income because they house Vatican or other church offices; the remaining 10 percent are rented at reduced rents to Vatican employees.

In 2023, these properties only generated €35 million euros ($39.9) in profit. Financial analysts have long identified such undervalued real estate as a source of potential revenue.

But Ward Fitzgerald, the president of the US-based Papal Foundation, which finances papal charities, said the Vatican should also be willing to sell properties, especially those too expensive to maintain. Many bishops are wrestling with similar downsizing questions as the number of church-going Catholics in parts of the US and Europe shrinks and once-full churches stand empty.

Toward that end, the Vatican recently sold the property housing its embassy in Tokyo’s high-end Sanbancho neighborhood, near the Imperial Palace, to a developer building a 13-story apartment complex, according to the Kensetsu News trade journal.

Yet there has long been institutional reluctance to part with even money-losing properties. Witness the Vatican announcement in 2021 that the cash-strapped Fatebenefratelli Catholic hospital in Rome, run by a religious order, would not be sold. Pope Francis simultaneously created a Vatican fundraising foundation to keep it and other Catholic hospitals afloat.

“They have to come to grips with the fact that they own so much real estate that is not serving the mission of the church,” said Fitzgerald, who built a career in real estate private equity.