The Third Wave (18 page)

Oscar and I started to hear from a few of the remaining volunteers in the area, with whom we were in touch via email, that rumors about us were flying in Sri Lanka. People were saying that Oscar had stolen all the tsunami money and was building homes for himself in Switzerland. Others claimed that we were on the run, hiding in coconut trees, and that when the international police had found us by shaking the trees we had dropped to the ground. After the cops had supposedly arrested us, we had been sent to the CIA for further questioning about where we had buried the tsunami money. The stories grew more and more elaborate.

We also heard reports from some volunteers who had just returned home to New York that Chamilla, our translator, was having a hard time. Now that we were gone, many of the villagers had turned on her with jealousy about how she had gotten too much help from the foreigners. They tried to involve her in the rumors about our having stolen the missing funds. I sent some of the volunteers still working in the Galle region to go check on her, and Chamilla told them that I had never helped her.

Sunil, our cameraman, was also being persecuted for being our friend. He didn’t argue against any of the rumors about us, either. I understand that both he and Chamilla were trying to survive in a hostile environment, but it must have looked really bad to the villagers when our two right-hand people, who had been with us every day, didn’t stand by us. It set us up for a homecoming reunion that we would never forget.

We had been back in New York for only ten days when it became clear to Oscar and me that we had to return to Sri Lanka. There was still a lot more work to do over there and it was the only place we wanted to be. We felt rested and anxious to get back to work. I missed my precious Tsunami-dog. I missed the dusted white sands and the turquoise seas. I missed the red-ink sunsets and the smell of chicken curries. I missed the nightly lightning shows off the coast. Most of all, I missed the children who swarmed us in love. We repacked our gear, found friends to donate tickets once more, and, knowing that our rent was now being covered, headed back to the jungle.

When we arrived in Peraliya after a thirty-hour plane ride, exhausted but eager to see our friends again, we found excited villagers running out to greet us. Women who previously had been unkind to me dropped down on their knees and asked for my forgiveness. We saw no signs of the viciousness we’d heard reported. The villagers said that they were happy we had come back to help them.

But then we got our first indication that something was wrong. Although it was spectacular to see the children, some of them remained at a distance. Oscar felt confused and hurt when he waved at his favorite kids and they just looked away. Soon after, Oscar learned that some parents had spread lies about him to their children and told them not to speak to him. He was furious. Oscar didn’t care about the adults’ pettiness, but finding out that the children, whom he loved dearly, had turned against him sent him over the edge. He flew into a rage and dragged the local police around to the villagers’ homes to clear up the stories.
Of course, each person blamed the rumors on someone else’s brother’s cousin’s nephew, who just happened to be absent.

To leave as helpers and to return as thieves was insulting and heartbreaking. I suppose that gossip and lies are an everyday way of life for many people, but I never got used to their behavior. We tried to stay focused on the bigger picture.

The news about Tsunami-dog was also disturbing. Ever since I had cleaned her up, every male dog in the village wanted a piece of her. She had gotten pregnant shortly before I left, and the puppies had been born while I was away. So as soon as I got back from New York, I raced over to the caretakers’ house to find her and her babies. At first I thought she didn’t recognize me, because she didn’t move when I entered the room and called her name. But then she gave me a few sniffs and our love was rekindled. I was furious to see that she was exhausted and undernourished. It looked like the family hadn’t been feeding her. In the corner sat her eight puppies, crammed into a small, cruel cage. At least the puppies resembled the junkyard dog that had followed her everywhere. It put me at ease knowing that her boyfriend would help defend her and her babies in the coming months.

Once Oscar and I had settled in, we saw that many of the NGOs had left, and the aid trucks had stopped coming. Monsoon rains had started, so tourism was nonexistent and the economy was suffering. It was a ghost town. Oscar and I were now the only volunteers left in Peraliya, with very few people working in town and other villages along the coast. An insecure feeling lingered in the air. The neediness in the village had escalated and sad letters
asking for money jumped into my hands daily. Some people had begun begging near the train station. In addition, the dangers of the area were becoming more visible, as local tribes had gone back to fighting one another.

On the other hand, there were some bright points of light. Dr. Stein had started breaking ground on the new medical center, and I was thrilled with the thought of the villagers receiving free healthcare. Sebastian, one of our early volunteers, was still working as a doctor down the coast doing great work. In his spare time, he started to operate on the sick and dying animals all around him. And CTEC, where I planned to focus my attention now that I was back, was coming along very well.

Upon my arrival at the tsunami center, the CTEC officers lined up in full uniform against the wall, saluting me as I walked past. I noticed that the walls were now filled with world maps, and books about earthquakes lay on the tabletops. Dr. Novil, my co-founder, told me that he had been busy teaching the new tsunami officers about disaster preparedness and had also been learning about it himself. They practiced evacuation drills daily. They had erected signs along the roads marking safe exit routes leading to higher ground, and warning people about dead-end streets. The CTEC officers made these road signs by hand, spending hundreds of hours creating them. In addition, they made flyers with information about the tsunami center and distributed them to all the villagers in the region.

On that first day back, we had to stop our meeting twice when false tsunami scares sent villagers fleeing into the jungle. At first I thought these were drills the officers had organized to show me their skills, but in fact they were real tsunami scares. The CTEC officers dutifully checked their computers, then made their rounds through the villages, reassuring everyone that it had been
a false alarm and that they could stay in their homes. Watching the team in action made me so proud. I thanked Dr. Novil and the officers for their hard work. Later that week, Telstra donated ten new cellphones to our cause.

Word about CTEC was spreading all over Sri Lanka. The police, the Navy, and other members of the military would stop by regularly to check on false tsunami reports. Shortly after the Nicobar earthquake, CTEC received letters from the United Nations officially endorsing the center and one from the minister of social services thanking them on behalf of the Sri Lankan government.

These were strange times in Sri Lanka, ones that made us shake our heads in confusion. So many amazing things were happening, but there were also so many deceptive schemes at work. I was learning that the aid business was a dirty one. I saw how the NGOs and villagers were each trying to take advantage of the other. One of our doctors summed it up especially well: He said that it was more honorable to be an arms dealer than to be in the aid business. The arms dealer says, “I have a gun, do you want to buy it?” He has no hidden agenda. Aid groups, on the other hand, would sometimes misuse and redirect funds in ways that made my blood boil, all in the name of helping people.

The corruption hadn’t started with this latest tsunami; it had been going on for decades. But it was magnified by the disaster. I saw villagers begging for new boats, and then turning around and selling them for cash as soon as the aid group had left. Then, a month later, they would beg the next aid group to buy them a boat. Some families received six boats and four houses in that way. Aid groups usually stayed for only two to three weeks before
a new team came in to take their place. The new people wouldn’t know the villagers and would innocently go forward to help them. As a result, the cunning were getting richer while the honest folks were still waiting for aid. The ones who spoke English received more aid than those who spoke only Sinhalese. Our job was to weed through the lies to find the truths, but it was becoming harder every day.

On the other side of the fence, the NGOs were highly accountable to their donors. In a rush to fulfill that need, some took photos of projects that weren’t their own, including ours. I visited websites where NGOs declared that they had rebuilt 2,000 homes when in reality none had been started. One group even had the nerve to post a photo of our hospital on their website. You can imagine my shock when I found it. While NGOs got mired in swamps of paperwork, people truly suffered and millions of tsunami aid dollars sat around in bank accounts and got redirected to other causes. That, in my mind, was the worst crime of all. Of course, there were also some NGOs doing great work, as well as many smaller volunteer groups that offered tremendous help.

For the past thirty years, the Sri Lankan government had been involved in an ugly civil war against the Tamil Tiger rebels. When the tsunami hit, some of the worst damage was in the northern region of the country, which was the stronghold of the Tamil Army. Thankfully, this brought about a cease-fire in order to get aid into the region. But the peace rapidly dissolved into mistrust, and as the months passed, suicide bombings and attacks were on the rise again.

Oscar had returned to training his soccer team, which gave him the idea of holding a soccer match against a Tamil team in Jaffna, on the front lines of the war zone. It was a fantastic and outrageous idea, like getting an Israeli team to play soccer against Hamas in Gaza. I was all for it.

We started out by visiting the heads of the Sri Lankan Soccer Federation and FIFA, the international soccer governing association, in Colombo to get the go-ahead for the match. The officials looked at Oscar as if he had two heads when he proposed his idea, but he kept insisting, and they gave their consent. Oscar
then visited the players’ homes to gain permission from their parents to come on the trip. He lined up everything on our end.

But two major obstacles still lay ahead, and they required us to fly up to the front lines of the war zone. First, we had to get the support of the Sri Lankan military commanders in the region. Second, we had to meet with Tamil Tiger leaders to ask if we could play a match against them on their territory.

We flew into the Sri Lankan Air Force base in Jaffna. An Army captain we had known from Galle who was now stationed there picked us up. We jumped into his jeep filled with snipers carrying submachine guns and drove through deserted war zones to an Army base. There, a Sri Lankan Army general met with us to discuss the soccer match. The general was excited about the game’s potential to build goodwill, but he wanted us to hold the game on the Army base. He thought it would be too dangerous for us to play on Tamil territory, as anyone in the crowd could start throwing grenades at any moment.

Oscar agreed to have his Galle team play one soccer match against the Army team on the Army base there in Jaffna. However, he insisted that his team also be permitted to play a game against the Tamil team on Tamil terroritory, presuming we could get the okay from the Tamil leaders. After a great deal of discussion, the general reluctantly conceded to Oscar’s plan. However, he made it clear that his men would not be responsible for our safety when we crossed enemy lines.

With that approval out of the way, we went to meet the Tamil Tiger terrorists to arrange the game against their team. The Army escorted us to a hotel in Jaffna, where we hung around for hours waiting for some sort of contact. Finally, a group of official-looking men in white shirts and ties showed up. We sat drinking
tea and discussing the game. They spoke with one another and made phone calls, clearly assessing us all the while.

Then, in a quick turn of events, the men urged us to follow them to their van and we obeyed. Looking back, we were extremely foolish to go with them. It was the equivalent of an unplanned meeting with al-Qaeda. But we had no agenda other than to play soccer, so we felt no fear.

We traveled a long way with the Tamils, passing through many Sri Lankan Army checkpoints. At each stop, the van was thoroughly searched. I observed that some of the men who were traveling with us had missing arms or legs and bullet scars on exposed body parts. Eventually we came to a Tamil Tiger checkpoint. After the van had been searched once more, the driver pulled up to the back of a house. The men instructed us to leave our bags in the vehicle and follow them. Men with Uzi submachine guns surrounded us as we walked out into the middle of a green field to a large, shady tree. Under the tree sat two nicely dressed, athletic men with 9mm guns tied around their waists, surrounded by men with even larger guns.

The well-dressed gentlemen invited us to sit down, and the soccer discussions began again. The Tamil Tigers’ main concern was that the Sri Lankan Army should stay away. After three hours of discussion, we agreed to trust the Tamil leaders’ word that they wouldn’t interfere with the game or with our players if we arrived for the match unprotected. We rose and shook firm hands, and the van raced us back to Jaffna before nightfall.

We visited the Sri Lankan Army general the next day and told him the news: Our Galle team would play a match in Tamil territory against a Tamil team with no Army presence. The general agreed to stay away, but hinted that he would have an undercover
unit hiding somewhere nearby just in case anything went wrong. Oscar and I were ecstatic. We couldn’t wait for the games to begin, but first we still had quite a bit of work to do and funds to raise.

Plans for the historic soccer matches, which we had decided to call Football Without Boundaries, came together when we received much-needed funding from Mr. Kiha Pimental of Hawaii via our friend Doug Kennedy. Then, a week before our big event was scheduled to take place, the Sri Lankan foreign minister was assassinated in his own home. The government declared a state of emergency and the country came to a standstill. Naturally, they blamed the Tamil Tigers for the incident. We nervously awaited news, wondering if our game would be canceled. I told Oscar not to be intimidated by the assassination. I felt strongly that if we didn’t go on with our lives and activities, the terrorists would win.