CHARLEVOIX, Mich. — Nancy Dammann is an ecologist who for decades has been helping people who live in the Amazon basin in rural Peru try to manage the environment and live better lives.
She is the co-founder of VASI, a nonprofit agency that works to teach people deep in the interior how to work together on projects like fisheries to build better and more sustainable lives.
But now, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, her own life may be in danger. She is stuck in the Toledo-sized city of Pucallpa, deep in Peru’s interior, in a country under near-total quarantine.
What’s more, she is sick — she has suffered from Lyme disease after she was bitten by a tick in Costa Rica years ago — and is running out of medication, and can’t get any, or easily get home.
“I’m in bed right now as I am talking to you,” she said in a phone interview last week. “I’m grateful for the actions the Peruvian president has taken. The quarantine was the right thing to do, but it means we continue to be stuck.”
She was supposed to fly home two weeks ago to Charlevoix, the small northern Michigan resort town on the shores of Lake Michigan where she grew up and her mother, Sara Gay Dammann, still lives.
“But then American canceled the flights, Peru closed the border, and also closed down all traffic, air or other, between districts.”
That left Nancy Dammann and, she estimates, about 2,000 other Americans stranded in her part of rural eastern Peru, not far from Brazil. “We can’t leave Pucallapa without first the embassy approving our travel, and then that being approved by multiple different Peruvian authorities.
“Right now we are waiting on the embassy. Nobody is asking for a free flight out — though that would be nice,” she laughed. “We just want to get home.”
But even when she is cleared to fly out of Peru, there are two more problems. One is getting from Pucallpa to Lima. At one point someone offered to send an ambulance, but she refused.
“That’s about a 20-hour drive [through rough terrain] and they only had one driver, and I wouldn’t want to tie up the ambulance.”
The other factor is even more serious. “I’m pretty sick and can’t travel without my husband — my doctor wrote a note in that regard,” she said. But her spouse, Edgardo Gomez Pisco, is a Peruvian, not a U.S. citizen. He has a visa that allows him to live and work in the United States and has not had a problem traveling with her before.
But now things have changed.
She has been in touch with both her congressman, U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman, a Republican, and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat.
“Their offices were assured it [getting her spouse permission to travel with her] wouldn’t be a problem, and they were shocked when I read them the text of the emails we are getting,” denying that, she said.
Eventually, Ms. Dammann said she received approval and was added to the manifest for a flight out of Lima, but that did her little good, since she has no way to get to the Peruvian capital. Plus, she can’t fly alone.
Not that she is a woman who has ever shrunk from a challenge. Now 44, she grew up in this northern Michigan resort town on the shores of Lake Michigan, where everything revolves around the water. But she wanted to make a difference in places in the world where the water and the environment was threatened.
So she went to Harvard, got a PhD in ecology at Columbia University, and headed off to the Amazon basin. For more than 20 years she has worked in Peru, studying how communities can help manage projects like fisheries and helping them do it.
Trying to break an age-old cycle of poverty and confront entrenched interests hasn’t been easy, to put it mildly.
Plus, there is her damaged health.
“Just before my 20th birthday, I was working on a couple ecological projects in Costa Rica, and I was bitten by a tick,” she said. It was years before the doctors figured out she had Lyme disease.
“For two years, I couldn’t work,” as she battled the effects. Now, the effects come and go. When she felt able, she plunged herself into her work in the Amazon basin, founding VASI, the Spanish acronym for an “Amazonian Vision for Sustainability.”
Now, she just wants to get better and have the pandemic pass so that she can return to her work.
“By the way, I don’t feel like a hero,” she said. “I think the community members [in VASI] are the real heroes. They have spent generations being disempowered, told they don’t count … and yet they are trying to find ways to stand up and not only improve their own lives but help the world. We are just the lucky ones to know them, and to try to get their voices heard.”
Jack Lessenberry is a former Blade national editor. He can be reached by email at omblade@aol.com.
(Editor’s Note: Nancy Dammann and her husband were finally given clearance to fly out of Peru; they expect to be in self-quarantine in Traverse City, Mich. by the end of the week.)
First Published April 2, 2020, 4:00 a.m.
