"Shortages in funds, medicines and masks threaten charity work around the world"

"Last Thursday morning Louisa Baillie drove down the five-kilometre dirt track that connects her jungle home in the Amazon rainforest to the main road. At the junction, she parked, hiking the rest of the way into Mera, a town of about 8,000 people.

After filling her backpack with fruit and vegetables from local sellers, she grabbed some leaves and set about plucking termites off trees along the roadside, stuffing them into a bucket containing small fragments of the insects’ nests. Baillie works as a veterinarian at Merazonia, a wildlife rescue centre in Ecuador. The termites were dinner for Andy the anteater, a baby recently confiscated at a police checkpoint.

“Normally we do the shopping twice a week, but at the moment moving around is quite difficult,” she explained by phone as she popped succulent leaves into the mouth of a baby sloth snuggled up against a teddy bear. The youngster had fallen out of a tree a few weeks ago and was now on the mend. “Now we’re trying to do more regular, smaller shopping trips, going into the village and seeing what we can pick up as we go along.”"

Gloria Dickie reports for the Guardian March 28, 2020. [2]