From Amy E. Duchelle

Note from an American friend of Vanessa working in the frontier of Acre, Bolivia and Peru

I am just back from the field to discover this shocking and devastating news about Vanessa. She and I had planned to spend this weekend together in Rio Branco to dance and laugh and just relax together from what has been a difficult few weeks of fieldwork for us both. Vanessa was one of my lights in Acre. It feels hard to move forward from this, feeling my own mortality and vulnerability like never before. In our last conversation just before she left for the field last week, she was dreaming about finishing her PhD and finding a mountain to meditate on. But knowing Vanessa, that meditation would only have lasted so long before she was back in the field fighting for what she believed in. When I first met her at a conference at the University of Florida, she had tears in her eyes when she talked about Ernesto Raez Luna mentioning the successes of ASCART, a group of Peruvian Brazil nut producers with whom she had worked for four years, in his presentation to an international audience of hundreds of people. In Acre, she considered the families in Reserva Riozinho dear friends. She stayed here for them, not for herself. I feel so lucky to have had Vanessa as a friend, and so terribly sad to feel the loss of her.

Big hugs to you all,

Amy E. Duchelle
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Florida