The Third Wave (10 page)

We would hear daily reports of orphaned tsunami children being kidnapped. Two French nurses who had just joined us had witnessed a child being dragged away screaming in another area but couldn’t do anything about it because the men produced Sinhalese paperwork. In Sri Lanka, when orphaned children reached a certain age, they often were sent to work for free in rich people’s homes or sold as sex slaves through the human trafficking markets. Thailand, Sri Lanka, and other nearby countries were the biggest sellers of children in the world. But we weren’t going to let it happen on our watch. So Bruce and James, a journalist volunteer from London, took a digital photo of every child in our village and drove inland to have them printed into school identification badges. The kids wore them every day. We kept an eye on everyone who came and went from Peraliya, and even put a guard at the hospital door and created patient cards for those who entered the hospital.

During our first week in Peraliya, the Sri Lankan trade and commerce minister, Mr. Jerarj Fernandoupulle, visited our camp to examine the tsunami damage. He said that he had been all over the country and that this was the worst area. He inspected our camp and then sat talking with us in our fly-infested hospital. Jerarj said he was impressed with our camp structure and gave us his blessing to continue running the show. He then gave us his private cellphone number and told us to call him if we needed anything. If things got stuck in customs, one call to Jerarj and the problem would be solved. Oscar loved the guy and referred to Jerarj as our godfather. The minister even assigned policemen to the village, saying they would watch over the villagers and the
volunteers. Jerarj was a great man who crossed the line from official to volunteer. Throughout our time in Peraliya, he made regular trips to the village, which we always appreciated.

Every day, I would be greeted by cats and dogs that jumped all over me, anxious for a feed. Pregnant cats walked around with no food in their tummies and puppies looked like walking skeletons. They were my new friends, yet they were slowly starving to death. Each morning, I would stop on the way to the village to get them food, and I’d administer eye drops to the cats that had lost their eyes.

In that part of the world, animals were typically beaten to death by rocks and treated atrociously. I once came across a small child who had kicked a puppy to death just for the fun of it. The locals had behaved that way for generations; it was nothing new to them. But I loved and fed the animals, and soon I had a tribe of loyal subjects following me everywhere. Some of the dogs were vicious junkyard animals that had been beaten by people their whole lives. All they needed was a kind, loving hand, and soon they were purring at my side like kittens. They became great guard dogs, too, since nobody would dare go near them.

One shaggy dog in particular stole my heart. I named her “Tsunami” at first, but that didn’t turn out very well. Every time I called her, the villagers would start running in fear. I changed her name to Tsunami-dog, spoken really fast. She was possibly the sickest being I had ever come across. When we met, Tsunami-dog was extremely underweight and had mange, worms, parasites, bleeding ears, fleas, and just about every other thing wrong with her. But once you got past the revolting exterior, she had a
perky personality, and we grew more in love every day. She had a permanent smile on her face. I located a vet to give her injections, and her coat slowly grew back. Soon, she was even cute.

Tsunami-dog followed me everywhere, not just for food but also for companionship. We went for walks on the beach and cuddled in front of the hospital, and she spent many hours humping my leg. At night, when I left Peraliya, she would run after my motorbike. In the morning, she was there to greet me at the front gate. She loved me unconditionally.

However, I often wondered if she would have been better off without me because after I had cleaned her up, she became quite the village tart. Every dog in the village wanted to have sex with her, leading to many difficult pregnancies.

Upon awakening one morning, I noticed that one of my kittens was missing. I found out that some of the villagers had cooked her up in a pot for dinner. This wasn’t customary, but they were very hungry. The village people had no food or money and were too scared to go back onto the ocean to fish. Clearly the food we were providing wasn’t enough. Earlier on in my emails, I had prayed for angels to come help us. Now I prayed for everyone in the world to come to our village.

In late January, James the journalist from London set up a volunteer website called
Peraliya.com
where we challenged people from around the world to come and help us in the village. We didn’t have time for detailed instructions, so at the top of the page I wrote, “Just come! We need your help. Get on a plane and drive to our village. Everyone is welcome here!!” And they came. Volunteers of every type from all walks of life and many different
countries just showed up in Peraliya, and, as promised, we found a place for each one.

James had become a valuable member of the team. He was a highly intelligent Englishman with a great sense of humor. He charmed all the female volunteers, which in turn kept up morale. He was always thinking of new ideas to improve the village life. One day he came up with a plan to delouse the children, which was a mammoth task. They used balloons and tricks to set about coaxing the children toward the water buckets. The children laughed and screamed, and after much drama, a lice-free victory was the hairdo of the day.

Our volunteers included CEOs and businesspeople, housewives from London, actors, teachers, lawyers, writers, surfers from Sweden, and even a stripper from Paris. Many people would declare that they had no skills, but we would tell them to do whatever they felt like doing, and it worked. We would see those same insecure volunteers playing with the children or contributing in other ways, building structures out of rubbish, cooking, acting as assistants in the clinic, or just cleaning up. One man with obsessive-compulsive disorder turned out to be the best person imaginable to have in a fly-infested hospital.

All of us volunteers would laugh about some of the cultural stereotypes that proved to be true. The Germans were very organized and had a lot of money. They had rules and strong ideas about leadership, but their hearts were in the right place. The Austrians were laid back, tech-savvy, and had a great sense of humor. The Italians brought stylish tents and good red wine.

Then there were those who busted stereotypes. Kym Anthony, a CEO from the largest bank in Canada, brought his eighteen-year-old daughter, Callen, with him because it was her birthday
wish to come and help. They lowered their heads in manual labor and had an overwhelmingly positive family experience.

There was a cool English couple named Jo and Rob who were only twenty years old and on their way around the world when they stopped to volunteer for five months. Some days they would peel carrots, and on other days they’d collect bodies, build, and take on just about every task imaginable. Rob then encouraged his entire family to come over. His amazing father, Peter Nossitor, a builder with J. G. Gleeson, went on to bring over many of his co-workers as well as other family members.

The beauty of volunteering is that you don’t need any skills to give someone a hug or hand out water. Anyone can do it. People think that after a disaster only medical or construction help is needed, but there are also thousands of traumatized children sitting around, and they need friends, entertainers, educators, and mums and dads as much as medical and financial help.

As more volunteers joined us, the town became busier and our guesthouse noisier. Each night back at the guesthouse, volunteers would show off their daily war wounds of bruises and scrapes. The volunteer medics were constantly digging splinters and nails out from everyone’s feet. Volunteers looked scruffy, sunburned, unshaven, and uncombed, but they had gigantic smiles on their faces.

The volunteers were able to buy a new wardrobe in the street markets for under a dollar. Many of the men started wearing saris on their bottom halves just like the Sri Lankan men. The sari was the national dress code of Sri Lanka and in the coastal villages we seldom saw men in pants.

Most volunteers came and went within a week and had few responsibilities, so they stayed up late at night on the beach letting off steam and playing guitars around a blazing fire. A few of the
surfer volunteers would disappear whenever the surf was up, but they always came back. The mixture of work and play kept them balanced. Many romances blossomed. Volunteers often had to use hand signals to communicate with one another because they didn’t speak the same language, but it didn’t stop them from making love. Bruce was our number one quiet achiever. Many volunteer girls had crushes on him. Oscar and I had already been a couple for some time, so at night we usually just ate dinner and went to sleep exhausted from the day. Donny remained loyal to his family back home in Australia. He was exhausted every night, getting up at five each morning to work in the melting sun. The only fluid he was getting enough of was beer, which relaxed him into a deep sleep every night.

We did manage to have some fun, too, in the midst of all our hard work. Oscar’s birthday was in late January, so we decided to have a celebration on the beach near our guesthouse with all the volunteers. We located long wooden tables and decorated them with local flowers and candles. Then we sat down to a delicious meal prepared by a local guesthouse. We ate fresh fish, fruit, rice, and dahl, and the local Lion beer flowed.

Later, the chief and a group of fishermen from Peraliya showed up. They joined in the celebration, and we realized that it was the first time we had hung out together socially. The Sri Lankans couldn’t hold their liquor so they got really drunk and the chief started dancing in a kind of disco-robot manner around the fire. I joined him, and we had a
Pulp Fiction
moment. The village men serenaded Oscar with drums, then asked him to sing for them. He howled “O Sole Mio” in an unknown key, and the dogs joined in.

Then the chief pulled out a large joint and the peace pipe was handed around to all who cared to partake. The sky was painted silver and I relaxed against a coconut tree into the enchanted night. Some of the German and Dutch guys got naked and went for a moonlit swim, while one of them took off on a motorbike with an Israeli girl to a secret island destination. It was a great night and friendships among locals and volunteers bloomed.

On January 26, we held a memorial service for the one-month anniversary of the tsunami. It also happened to be
Poya
, a Sri Lankan holiday celebrating the full moon, which was marked by a Buddhist ceremony in which the whole village stays up the entire night chanting prayers. Elegantly costumed male dancers led a drum procession to a staging area where people sat on the ground. Monks presided over the ceremony, sitting in a specially woven grass hut.

It was both a spiritual and a spooky night. Most of the Buddha statues had been beheaded during the tsunami. The villagers adorned the headless statues with flowers and surrounded them with candles, praying at their feet. Oscar, Bruce, Donny, and I walked around the village visiting families and lighting candles to honor the dead. The train tracks were sprinkled with oil lamps and candles were placed inside. I lit some candles in the rubble of Chamilla’s house and a few young children held back my hair when I came too close to the fire.

In Sri Lanka, the monks were revered. Whenever they came to visit, it was a rule that a villager had to place a white sheet on the chair before the monk could sit down. I hadn’t learned this rule, so during the ceremony I casually went over and sat on one of the comfortable white chairs, thinking they were for us. Some village
men grumbled at me in disgust and pointed for me to sit on the dirt floor.

The Peraliya monks were honest, kind, and very young. Some of them were still kids. It was difficult for them to preside over tsunami funeral ceremonies where people had lost over eighteen family members. The young monks’ voices would weaken at times during the ceremony and they would burst into uncontrollable tears. I had spent time with many monks in Burma and Thailand, but this was the first time I had ever seen them cry in public.

The
Poya
chanting was soothing and rhythmic. I found it impressive for the first few hours, but then it began to put me to sleep. I noticed the other volunteers nodding off, too, so we headed back to our guesthouse in Hikkaduwa. When we got back there, we could still hear the chanting, which was being broadcast through the entire town by loudspeakers. By now it annoyed us, sounding whiny and repetitive and continuing all night long. Some of the volunteers threw objects at the loudspeaker in the tree, screaming profanities out their windows, but the chanting kept on.

Life in Peraliya sped along, and soon it was February. Every day, hundreds of bored children would hang out around the hospital. They had no homes to go back to. We realized that it was time to reopen the school. It was important to get the kids back to some sort of normalcy and give them something to do during the day.

Ironically, the villager who was most resistant to the idea was the headmaster. He was a cowardly, weak, lazy man from another region and he fought against any reasonably good ideas presented to him. Another problem was that the teachers themselves
were tsunami victims and many were still traumatized and getting their own lives back together. However, we knew that reopening the school was the best thing to do for the children. So we held a village vote, and the majority of locals gave the plan their approval.

Oscar, Bruce, and James started by building a small open classroom at the end of our makeshift hospital. They weren’t construction workers, so they made it up as they went along. They found large planks of wood and canvas to rig a shelter from the sun. James had originally come to help only for a day, but when Oscar thrust a hammer into his hand and asked him to finish building the classroom, he said that he was willing. When it was finished, they had matching thumb blisters in exactly the same place and were proud of themselves. Two female Dutch volunteers gave English and art lessons in the open classroom, and the children were kept busy learning all types of ideas from the Western world.