The Third Wave (9 page)

I devoted most of my time and energy to the makeshift hospital, where we were seeing over a thousand patients a day. I tied my hair back under a white scarf and drew a red cross on it so that people would know to come to me for first aid. I found a Dutch doctor and two nurses at the Hikkaduwa guesthouse, where a steady stream of volunteers were now arriving, and recruited them to join me. They had acquired several doses of the tetanus vaccine, and I stored the precious serum in a bucket filled with ice that I bought from a town vendor. I carried that blue bucket with me everywhere, making sure the ice didn’t melt so the batch wouldn’t go bad.

Not long after that, I met two young German doctors, named Sebastian and Henning, at the guesthouse. They were fresh out of medical school and became valuable members of our team. Henning was brilliant at translating the names of the various drugs that were donated by volunteers from all over the world. He built a medicine cabinet and carefully separated and labeled all the drugs. Sebastian created a mobile ambulance out of a tiny three-wheeled vehicle called a tuk-tuk. He placed a German paramedic
sticker on the side to make it appear more official, but it still looked like a big toy. Tuk-tuks were the main mode of transportation in the area and were a cheap way to get around. They had no doors, and it could get quite breezy at high speeds. Sebastian and Henning drove off to faraway villages treating people and would sometimes drive them back to the field hospital for further help. Later, Sebastian bought the hospital a refrigerator, which proved to be a major turning point because it allowed us to store important medicines.

As I worked in the hospital, mothers told me heart-wrenching stories of the children who were washed from their arms. I remained strong as my translator stumbled through broken dialogue and women cried into my chest.

I came down with a 103-degree fever for a few days and perspiration flooded my body. Still, I felt there was no time to stop and rest. The villagers had larger problems than mine.

Children surrounded the hospital all day long begging for milk, and when they didn’t get my attention, they would pinch my arm or leg really hard until I screamed out in pain and turned to notice them. I had brought paper and pencils with me, which I gave to the children to keep them busy. They started drawing tsunami images with dead bodies and giant waves destroying their homes. I hung the pictures on the hospital walls and the kids drew hundreds more.

Wherever we went, we recruited tourists and expatriates living on the island to come work in our village. In addition, word of our field hospital had spread throughout the region, so people would just show up at our village to offer help. Sometimes volunteers would offer us $100 in cash, but we would give them a list
of supplies instead. They would turn around and drive miles inland to find stocked stores, returning by the end of the day like Santa Clauses, bearing bags of the goods we needed. Many journalists who were in the region to report on the situation were so affected by the devastation that they crossed the professional line and started working with us as volunteers or left money for us to buy food.

We soon realized that we had to establish a management system for our relief efforts. On the first day, we had met the village chief and a number of other responsible men. Oscar and Bruce held regular meetings with them through our translator, Chamilla. Together, they formed committees for food distribution and other basic tasks, and chose organizers to be in charge of each one. They drew up long lists of the families in the village to make sure people didn’t double up on aid and that everyone was treated fairly. Each day, Oscar and Bruce would hold a meeting with heads of the various committees to discuss camp problems.

Temporary shelters were popping up all over the village, but we were in a race to get people under some sort of roofing before the monsoons came flooding through in March. Bruce serendipitously acquired a large shipment of tents that an NGO had dumped somewhere farther up the coast. Oscar and his committees distributed these to families in the village.

The housing situation improved again when a group from the Danish government called Danish People’s Aid came to town and pledged to pay for 700 temporary wooden shelters if we could help provide manpower to build them. Naturally, we said yes. The much-needed temporary shelters were ten feet wide by twelve feet long and often had to house fourteen family members. They were supposed to last only until permanent homes
could be arranged. The committees gave temporary housing first to pregnant women and those who had been seriously injured; the rest was based on a lottery system. Even though the shelters had four walls, the villagers still had nothing to put inside. We took a photo of each family to hang on their wall as a new beginning.

In late January, we moved into a new guesthouse that was a dollar a night cheaper, which meant a lot to us at that point. At night we would collapse in excited exhaustion and drink beers and king coconuts around a bonfire on the beach. There were more stars out than could ever be counted.

The town of Hikkaduwa, where our guesthouse was located, was slowly reopening, in large part thanks to the help of the U.S. Marines who were on vacation from the Iraq war. We invited them to Peraliya and asked for satellite photos of the area to see how much damage had been done. The photos revealed that the village was now four feet below sea level, which meant that the area would continually flood. The Marines were in Sri Lanka to restore government facilities and hotels, so unfortunately they didn’t have permission to help us clear land. But they did boost our morale and play volleyball with the children in front of the hospital.

Oscar, Donny, Bruce, and I were so overloaded with work that we usually wouldn’t even stop to eat during the day. The food in the village was spicy and strange-tasting anyway, and large bugs and other unrecognizable materials would fall into it. So we lived mostly on bananas and the local king coconuts, which were extremely large green and yellow coconuts with clear milk and without the strong coconut taste. Known to cure more than forty-eight
diseases, they also made an excellent moisturizer and hair conditioner.

A few mom-and-pop food operations started opening up at the local guesthouses, and they would cook meals for the volunteers. The only problem was that if many hungry volunteers descended on one guesthouse at the same time, it could be hours before we ate. The guesthouse cooks would prepare only one meal at a time and present it to the person before going back inside to cook the next meal. By the time the fourteenth volunteer received his meal, it would be three hours later. I thought it was a very strange way to do things, but we learned to make it work for us by dropping off our dinner orders at least five hours before we planned on eating.

On one particularly busy day at camp, hundreds of children swarmed about the hospital while the adults had their heads deep in worries. Then an Israeli volunteer group came through the village and started playing games with the children designed to release trauma. They were fantastic. The games included a laughter circle where we would all point at one another and laugh, as well as a mime circle where we would pretend to throw gigantic balls at each other. Oscar joined in to play. He would fall on the ground and grunt loudly, leaving the children in hysterics. We linked hands at the end and cried tears of happiness. It was the first time we had heard the children laughing and singing.

That night, we invited the Israeli volunteers to stay at our guesthouse. Some very fine red wines surfaced from their luggage. The Israelis knew firsthand about trauma and what people needed after a long day in the field. We invited them to stay with us longer.

On one particularly hot day, we decided to take the children
out of the village and across the road to the ocean for a swim for the first time since the tsunami. We wondered if the children would ever trust the sea again. Oscar led the way, putting on his snorkel and flippers and blowing his whistle. Hundreds of children, parents, volunteers, cats, dogs, and drunks excitedly followed. We crossed the highway and stood on a small piece of soil above the beach. The Israeli volunteers gave the children a large piece of rope with colored flags on it, and they held hands and began to sing and dance in a circle. After that, we headed onto the rocks and climbed down to the sand. I looked back to where we had been singing and realized we’d been on top of the unmarked graves of the 3,000 local tsunami victims. Nobody seemed to have noticed or minded that we had literally been dancing on people’s graves. I liked the idea that a joyful ceremony had spontaneously erupted at that very spot.

When we got to the seashore, many of the children began to cry out in fear. They shouted, “Big wave, big wave!” We reassured them that they were safe. We held hands, forming a long line that stretched across the beach, and slowly walked toward the ocean, where we began by dipping our toes in the water. There were excited shrieks and many children ran back to the safety of the rock wall. Oscar, Sebastian, and the Israeli volunteers did crazy somersaults into the water, trying to entice the children back into the sea. About thirty boys ended up swimming with them, while most of the girls and very young children stayed at the water’s edge, clinging on to me for dear life.

Taking the kids to the ocean for the first time after the tsunami

We stayed at the beach for a few hours, the parents watching their brave children from the road. Our first official swimming day was a success, and we followed it with many more.

The chief of the village was a sturdy fisherman with a fleet of boats. Although he was sixty-eight, which is quite old by Sri Lankan standards, he was built like a bronzed god. He had two wives who loved him very much. Years earlier, when the new government had come to power, the secret police had captured him, beat him up, and pulled off his toenails and fingernails. They poured chili powder over him and left him to die in a closed sack. After this, he supposedly escaped and lived for a year in a fishing boat at sea, and then later slept in a secret coffin buried underground. Whether or not the story was true, it was part of the legend that made the chief a beloved leader.

During the tsunami, the chief had lost everything he owned except for one boat, but he always seemed to have plenty of marijuana on him, which made him very popular with some of the volunteers. He would often invite the volunteers over for a fish dinner, and we would sit in his dirty shed and laugh the night away.

We wanted the chief and his leadership committee to feel like an important part of the rebuilding process. We continuously emphasized that we were not there to take over their village, but to work together with them to get them back on their feet. After a time, the chief treated me like his granddaughter.

With the chief of Peraliya, A. P. Darmedesa

In spite of our fondness for each other, the chief and I would butt heads nearly every other day, though I knew he was trying to help his village in the fairest way he knew how. He never accepted any gifts for himself, always giving them away to others who needed the help more. Yet despite his equitable intentions, he would get furious when I helped certain villagers who he considered to be murderers, thieves, or whores. I explained that I wanted to take care of all people equally, just like he did. If we helped only the “good” people, then the “bad” people would be even more desperate and worse off than before. Besides, who was I to decide who was good and who was bad. I told the chief that we should leave that role up to Buddha or God.