The Third Wave (13 page)

With Nardika (far left) and her sisters

When the weather was too rough to swim in the ocean, we paid off a local hotelier to let the kids swim in his pool during our Sunday outing. Usually it was prohibited for locals, but when no tourists were in town he agreed to it. We had so much fun swimming in the pool, but the kids would jump on top of me with their lice-ridden hair tentacles crawling all over my body, and I was terrified of catching them. I could hear those little white buggers slowly conspiring to jump on my hair. Nardika, the little girl I had helped on the first day in the village, and her teenage sisters wore their long hair in childlike plaits, but it didn’t hide the white specks that lived in them. I’d grown very close to those girls, who told me that before the tsunami, their father often went hungry while giving them his share of the food and they would sing songs to his tummy when it was growling from hunger. In a way, the tsunami had been a good thing for them, because now they had food to eat. The disaster had leveled the socioeconomic playing field.

It was a miracle I never caught lice from any of the children, but something lived on my face for a while, an organism so small that it was undetectable by the human eye. In extreme heat, it would make my face itch unbearably all day long. I was determined to kill whatever it was. I scrubbed my face with alcohol, and after that failed, I tried a whole bunch of strange concoctions, including toothpaste and nail polish remover. (Warning: Do not try this at home.) The product that finally did the job was the lice-killing solution we had used on the children. I slathered it on like a face mask and let it soak in for ten minutes. It stung a little but I stuck with it, convinced that it was killing the little critters on my face. And indeed, after that I had no more itches. I must have caught it from kissing my Tsunami-dog. She had all sorts of crawly things living on her but was so cute that I couldn’t resist cuddling her anyway.

Donny would rise while it was still dark out to get a head start on the day before the hot sun melted the workers. He would arrive at Peraliya way too early, waking everyone up. He would walk around the village, checking on the rebuilding progress, then stop off in one of the homes for tea. There, he could speak with small groups of men about various village problems in a casual, friendly setting. Donny was an immensely valuable member of our team and also my dear friend.

Then one day, Donny unexpectedly collapsed to the ground. Some villagers rushed him into our field hospital. His leg shook in the most unusual manner, like he had a snake crawling around inside him, and he said the spasms were painful. Shouren, a young Scottish doctor, took over, because the situation was too complex for me to handle. Shouren injected Donny
with painkillers, and he fell in and out of consciousness as we carried him on a stretcher into the back of a van to rush him to a faraway hospital.

Seeing Donny lying motionless in the back of the van like that stunned everyone. Donny loved to make great entrances, and here he was making an even more dramatic exit, as the village women wailed around the van. Dr. Stein, our resident German doctor, and Dr. Novil, our Sri Lankan angel, went with him to the hospital. Michelle, a volunteer from London, also accompanied him and cared for him in the hospital every day. She became Donny’s hero. The first hospital turned out to be quite unhygienic, so they continued on four hours north to the one decent hospital in Sri Lanka, in the capital city of Colombo.

The days passed quietly as we waited for word from Donny. Oscar drove up to visit him, and many of the villagers made the long bus trek up to the capital to see him as well. With one man down, I was unable to leave the village to visit. We felt his loss. We didn’t realize until he was gone that he had been doing the work of ten men.

With Donny in the hospital, Oscar gone to visit him, and Bruce tending to logistics in Galle, I endured quite a few days in Peraliya when the workload became overwhelming. People flooded into the hospital with all sorts of problems and I did my best to solve whatever they threw my way. I held six different conversations at one time while sitting at the large hospital desk full of strange items, from a wooden leg to hula hoops to deworming tablets. Sometimes twenty people would swarm around me at once while another sixty waited outside to have their say. The whole time I also had to keep an eye on running the hospital as cheeky kids ran in and out looking for cricket balls, and other villagers tried to sneak supplies.

Visitors from an American Southern Baptist church had stopped by to meet me when I received a call to retrieve sixteen bodies, so I just took the guests along with me. We continued our conversation as we collected corpses (which I now looked forward to doing because it gave me a chance to get some exercise). A local chopped down some king coconuts for us, and we drank these as we hiked for miles through the rugged jungle. After we finished our task, we hitched a ride on an old tractor-trailer back to the hospital. I never saw that group again.

Inside the small kitchen located at one end of the hospital, a few volunteers were busy preparing a Thai salad with fish sauce. It smelled like dead bodies to me, so I took a whiff from my Chanel No. 5 bottle and walked outside to breathe fresh air. But I did not find any peace out there, either. Instantly, I was swarmed by children begging for the imitation treats they called ice cream—the ice-cream man had just arrived. All throughout this stampede, my beloved Tsunami-dog excitedly humped my leg.

Ten days later, Donny returned from the hospital a different man. He had decided that he needed a longer rest and that it would be his last day in the village before returning home to Australia. He hobbled around Peraliya sharing good-byes as villagers broke down in tears at the news that he was leaving.

One thing Donny had wanted to finish before he left was a shed for an old drunken man we called Grandpa. His family had thrown him out years ago, and we would find him lying on the ground with large red ants crawling inside his ears. Donny wanted to make sure the old man had a roof over his head. Donny had contacted the family and argued with them that although
their father was a drunk, he was still a human being and needed to be cared for, but his pleas had fallen on deaf ears. He made Chamilla and me promise that we would take care of him. That wouldn’t be hard for me because Grandpa was one of my favorite villagers. He had been my first patient in the hospital back in the early days. He would close his hands and bow in prayer whenever he saw me, and I would pretend he was a great king coming to visit me. I would put him in my hospital chair and clean out his infected eyes while he ate milk and cookies.

Donny was close to many of the families, and they begged him not to leave. They told him that we were the only gods they had seen after the tsunami. When Donny heard that, he broke down into little boy tears and explained to them that he was not a god or a superman but just a regular human being. He told them how much he missed his wife and children. He said he felt guilty that the work was only a tenth of the way finished, but he needed to go home. They told him that if it hadn’t been for his work, they wouldn’t have had so much as a drink of water.

Later that night on the beach we held a farewell party. Volunteers from all over the coast came by to honor the legend of Donny. He was part of what had come to be known as “the Third Wave”—the original volunteers who had arrived to help soon after the two tsunami waves had hit, destroying buildings and killing over a quarter of a million people.

People toasted and shared thoughts, and a technobeat blasted away as the village chief and I danced our butts off. Later, Oscar, Bruce, Donny, and I walked along the water’s edge to say final good-byes. The moon was smiling and a hopeful breeze warmed our hearts. We laughed and wept and spoke of memories that now shaped our souls. We hugged in a tight circle as a billion
stars winked to us and the moment spun into history. We had been a good team. Donny would find his way back to us, of that we were sure.

The next morning, in a quiet moment, I said a private good-bye to the loud man who had improved my hearing and thanked him for playing with us in the sandpit. As the van pulled away, village children followed yelling, “Donny!! Donny!!”

“Good-bye, machan,” I whispered, using Donny’s own favorite phrase, as I walked back inside the hospital.

We had been experiencing problems of all kinds, including thievery, jealously, violence, and alcoholism. But the worst crime of all was the steadily decreasing international attention to the tsunami victims as time passed and, as a consquence, the slowing down of aid money. The day after a visiting U.N. delegation had visited, hopeful that our funds and resources might increase as a result of their attention to Peraliya, the volunteers gathered into the hospital for an impromptu meeting.

People openly shared their feelings around the hospital table. The general sentiment was that we were working our guts out and nobody in the village seemed to appreciate it—or at least that’s what we thought. When things are going well, people have a tendency to remain quiet, but when times are tough, people speak in hurricanes. All we had heard these past few weeks were complaints. Every day, villagers confronted us, accusing us of stealing the tsunami money, even though we had given them everything we owned, including our clothes and the last of our money.

It felt like we were running a small country and we just couldn’t please everyone. Women would lie to our faces that their children had received nothing, even though we had given them food, water, shelter, medical care, schooling, uniforms, books, and a dozen other small things. They would complain and complain, but then not propose any solutions. It discouraged us.

I speculated that the villagers were emerging from the grieving stage and realizing they didn’t have anything left. Depression was supplemented with anger, and the villagers increasingly showed signs of distrust toward one another and us. Arguments broke out outside the hospital daily, often resulting in stabbings. We had to sew up an extra five people a day due to knife fights. People would stab each other over a packet of cigarettes, not thinking about the long-term ramifications of their actions. Suicides were on the rise, too, as was drug use. Some days, we would find used medical needles sitting in open rubbish piles around the school area where the children played. We knew that the needles weren’t from the hospital, which routinely collected hazardous medical equipment in a sealed bucket and disposed of it in town.

Sometimes I would be alone in the hospital when drunken men would violently shake the window bars and threaten to blow the place up. I knew they could do it, too, because we had found hand grenades in the rubble in the early days, and a small child had even brought one in to a volunteer. Donny had searched extensively for dangerous explosives in an attempt to clear them all away, but more could turn up at any time.

As the volunteer meeting continued, we poured out our frustrations, and the possibility was raised of our pulling out entirely. Some volunteers thought that the people of Peraliya were too
spoiled by us now and that we should go elsewhere on the coast, where the villagers needed more help.

Bruce, as always, was the voice of reason. He explained that most of the problems were coming from just a few troublemakers. We were not trying to change the villagers’ lives nor did we understand their culture, he said. We had to stay focused on the bigger picture, which was giving the villagers the basic infrastructure they needed to get back on track.

At the end of the day, we decided to call a meeting with all of Peraliya to iron out problems and ask the villagers if they wanted us to close the medical center and go home. Personally, I felt it was too soon for us to leave. I knew the medical center couldn’t last forever, but I also wanted to see the end of some very bad tsunami-related infections. The next day, we posted translated signs around the village asking everyone to attend. We expected about twenty people to show up, but within a few hours more than a hundred people were milling around. We placed a long table in front of the crowd and recruited an educated Sri Lankan scholar, who just happened to be passing through the village, to translate.

The talks lasted for five hours under a punishing sun. We focused primarily on solving problems, from thievery, to rebuilding, to distribution of goods and funds. At the end, we took a vote about the future of the medical center. The villagers were one hundred percent in favor of its remaining open. Meeting adjourned.

We were expecting a popular American clown doctor to visit Peraliya that afternoon. But after the town hall meeting, the volunteers were exhausted beyond belief and wanted to go home to take showers. We left the village disappointed. The clown finally
arrived while we were away and ended up having a fun time with the kids. But adults need clowns as well. We were feeling so low and discouraged after the events of the past few days, even though the meeting had gone well, that we sucked up our last bit of energy and decided to join the clown and his troupe for dinner.