‘You’ve done nothing!’

There’s a note of panic in Mari Luz’s voice when she calls. ‘Senorita, it’s arrived,’ she says. She doesn’t have to say more: Covid-19 has reached her small village on the Maranón River, in Peru’s northern Amazon region.

I feel an upwelling of panic myself as I think of her elderly parents who still bathe in the river at sunset every day, her aunt, the wise and ancient village midwife, and the children, our teachers, guides and companions during the many visits my husband and I have made over the past six years. Our home in Peru’s southern Andean mountains feels hopelessly far away.

But this is not the moment to fall apart. Mari Luz Canaquiri, who runs a volunteer group – the Kukama Women’s Federation – and has worked on campaigns to defend the Amazon’s rivers and indigenous territory for 20 years, has called to strategize: I must alert health authorities and help coordinate donations of medicine and supplies to the villages in her district.

It is mid-May and despite quick actions by Amazon leaders in March, closing their communities to outsiders, the virus has found a way in. A local mayor in a neighbouring district was reported to have spread the virus by delivering food aid to indigenous communities. In Mari Luz’s area,