The Third Wave (12 page)

In my first weeks in Peraliya, I had collected bodies using body bags that German paramedics had given us. But when those ran out, I used green garbage bags and old shopping bags. I was constantly on the lookout for new body bags and called the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army asking for donations, but Sri Lanka was completely out of bags. My cousin Christine ordered some from Australia but they never arrived, so another volunteer brought us chic designer body bags from Paris.

I usually went to collect bodies alone or with one or two volunteers, but for our first large body collection expedition, I gathered up a dozen or so volunteers and headed inland, where the water had surged up a river and taken hundreds of villagers along with it. We trekked for miles with sweat pouring down our faces and backs. The German paramedics who walked with us were dressed in hospital whites, which quickly became covered in sweat and dirt.

We came to an exposed area where I saw something strange lying in front of me. At first I didn’t recognize it. It was a human body with two feet sticking up in the air. Everyone took two steps backward as I walked over to it. The toes were long and elegant, the feet dry like someone had drained the water out of them. The lower legs barely had any meat left on them, but the thighs, chest, and inner organs were still in good condition. The head was a raw skull with long black hair caressing it. I stared at it, knowing that sooner or later I would have to pick it up. This, after all, was the reason we had come.

Body collecting

I slipped oversized blue rubber gloves over my hands and unzipped the white body bag, placing it next to the body. Then I quickly picked up the legs and swung them into the bag, followed by the heavy head. I zipped the body bag up, trapping the flies and maggots inside. One of the paramedics helped me carry the corpse to our designated collection spot. Donny came walking over from another direction with his own body bag, his face looking drained.

The second body I found was not far from the first, but it was stuck in a soggy, muddy place and a lot harder to unearth. I was wearing the black Army boots that I had purchased in Soho only
a few days before leaving for Sri Lanka, which felt like a lifetime ago. I craved a bubble bath and my Jimmy Choos, but instead here I was, digging up corpses under a sweltering sun.

I found a long wooden plank and placed it in the mud in front of me so that I could walk out to the body without sinking into the mud. When I reached the body, I squatted down and gave a solid tug on the head, which snapped off into my hands. The rest of the body fell back into the swampland. I found a huge stick to lift the stringy legs over to my body bag, but then the thighs snapped off. “Pass me that leg,” I said to a hippie volunteer who had come to help me. In a Sri Lankan minute (which means a long time), the dirty deed was done.

The grim operation went on for hours. When it was over, we headed back home in silence, swinging the bodies over our backs like a delivery of dirty clothes to the laundromat. Once we were out of the jungle, we collapsed in exhaustion and drank king coconuts under a palm tree. Donny threw up. He said it hadn’t been the sight of the dead bodies as much as the revolting smell of decay that had disagreed with him. This is where my Chanel No. 5 came in handy. A little under the nose took me all the way to Paris.
Vive Coco Chanel!

In some villages, more than forty children and adults would watch our every move as we collected bodies. Some trips would generate twenty-four corpses, others just one or two. The bodies had millions of maggots and flies living inside of them and were mostly unrecognizable to their loved ones. I became fascinated with the bodies in their various stages of decay. They turned up in trees and drains and under rubble. Oscar came with us once, but he fell into a mud hole filled with bodies up to his waist. After that experience, he never came again. On one occasion, I found a body in a strange location at the very top of a steep hill where no
water could have possibly reached. I wondered if it could have been a murder.

Several weeks and many body collections later, I became known as the Body Collector. People started bringing me unidentified heads and legs and other body parts. One afternoon while I was sitting on the side of a dirt road with a tattered leather bag full of legs and arms hanging out of it, a little boy ran up to me and handed me an arm. I laughed out loud as I made room in my bag for it. I had to stash body parts in the school’s new bathrooms and other sneaky places at night to keep the dogs from eating them until the coroner came the next day to retrieve them.

I am not usually a superstitious person. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that on numerous occasions during those first few weeks of body collecting, Oscar’s motorbike would stop running for no reason at all at the very same spot on the road to Peraliya. There was nothing wrong with the bike and it was always full of gas; it felt as though something was drawing us to the area. A week later while out collecting corpses, I found a woman’s body in a beautiful sea-blue dress close to where the bike had stopped each time. The body was three feet underground, hidden by a tree trunk, and covered with sand. A small piece of the blue dress sticking out of the sand had caught my attention. After I collected the body, Oscar’s bike never stopped there again.

In mid-April, we arrived in Peraliya one day to find the ocean flooding into the tents and temporary wooden shelters. A large tide was seeping in. The tsunami had taken along with it an extra four feet of earth and destroyed the drainage system, so half of the village was now underwater. The highway had flooded, too, and traffic had backed up along the coast.

Donny took charge, stopping bulldozers along the road to help create a wall of rubble to block the sea. I walked around the village in gumboots, visiting families in their huts. In some areas the water came up to my waist, and we hurried to save beds and blankets. Sacks of rice were ruined, as was much of what the villagers had carefully collected for the past four months.

The sea continued to rise. Oscar and Bruce set up wooden tide markers behind the village to judge the water levels surging up the river. We needed new shelter fast. Amazingly, earlier in the day I had placed a business card in my pocket, given to me by a man I had smiled at in town. He was from the Salvation Army. I called him and told him that I needed forty tents right away. He indicated that they would arrive in a few hours, and he was as good as his word. We set the Salvation Army tents on higher ground. Soon the tidewaters receded, and our latest crisis was averted.

Peraliya had become a well-known IDP camp. Our hard work had earned us a good reputation along the coast and in the Sri Lankan newspapers. The villagers and the Sri Lankan papers had given me the title “Angel of Galle,” and people came from all over the country to meet me. It was quite a silly title, but sometimes it proved useful. One man traveled nine hours on a bus to meet me, bringing one pineapple with him to give to the village. When he told me he was a rich farmer, I sent him home to bring us back a truckload of fruit. He returned days later with mountains of tangy sweet pineapples. If the Angel nickname was going to help us move forward, I’d take it.

We had heard in the news reports that billions of dollars in tsunami aid money had been collected around the world. It was one of the largest fund-raisers recorded in history. But the money hadn’t reached Sri Lanka. Our project in Peraliya survived initially off our own money and funds sent to us from friends and family through Western Union, and later with donations from other volunteers and people who found out about us from friends and sent money over the Internet. My friends Melinda Roy and Taylor Poarch, for example, collected money from friends in Florida and from the dancers of the New York City Ballet to help us.

But the four of us were broke. We hadn’t paid our hotel or food bills in Hikkaduwa in months, and I was now behind in rent on my apartment back in New York, too. Then an angel from Texas named Larry Buck crossed our path. A minister, he had come with funds from his church to help the tsunami victims, as well as with a group of Philippine medics and some fishing boats. When he asked us what we needed, we answered as we always did, by requesting something for the village. But Larry stopped us from speaking and asked us what we needed for ourselves. We never accepted anything but food, so we told him we were fine. On arriving back at our guesthouse that night, we found that Larry Buck had completely taken care of our room and food bills.

The villagers in Peraliya had also heard about all the international aid money raised and started wondering what had happened to it. They began accusing one another of having it and not sharing it. Inevitably, their accusations turned to us. We tried not to give money out in front of people and would usually spend it on goods for the village as a whole rather than on individuals. But every now and again, a story would break my heart and I would quietly slip a few dollars into someone’s pocket for a pair of eyeglasses or heart medication. By the time I had walked back to the hospital, the rumors would already be buzzing that I had given away $10,000.

Whenever we gave out free goods, such as clothing, it caused a lot of trouble. The women would line up in the hot sun for hours while the village men sat under the coconut trees drinking
arrack
. The women would sometimes get aggressive, pushing one another to be first in line and then fighting over the goods, often ripping the donations in half. When I ran out of clothes to give away, sometimes they would spit on me.

On one occasion, I had only forty-five mosquito nets but more
than 300 women waiting. Everyone wanted a mosquito net, and when there were no more left, the women attacked, scratching and bruising me. I had had enough of their bickering and jealousy, and I wanted to show them how disgusting their behavior looked. So I started screaming like a wildcat, swinging my arms out in front of me with sharp nails clawing into the air.

The women stopped in shock. There was a quiet pause followed by great howls of laughter when they realized I was mimicking them. The group dissolved in shame … only to start right back up again the next day. I made the decision then that I wasn’t going to be the one to physically give out aid anymore; someone crazier than me would have to deal with that hell.

The adults were behaving like children and the children were behaving like adults. When asked if they had received food that day, the adults would lie and say no, just so they could get more free stuff. We learned to ask the children first because they always told us the truth. Sometimes when the villagers complained too much at the clinic, I would lock the door and walk away down the railway tracks. The children would run after me surrounding me with love, telling me that I was helping them and that the grown-ups were bad. They would all try to kiss me at once, which melted my soul, and I would walk back to the hospital for business as usual.

Somewhere in the growing-up process, we lose our way and become too complicated. We teach our children not to fight and to love one another but we don’t do that in our own adult lives. I learned a great deal from the children in Peraliya: They taught me the importance of spontaneity, the ability to pick up and move on, to adapt, to forgive, and to trust.