The Third Wave (19 page)

On August 22, 2005, eight months after the tsunami struck Sri Lanka, Oscar, James, and I sat on a bus with a team of excited Peraliya soccer players who were singing their lungs out. The Sri Lankan military had given us the go-ahead for the soccer tournament. I was the only female in our group. We had brought Dr. Novil along as the team doctor, and the two of us discussed emergency procedures just in case we found ourselves in the middle of a bloody massacre. An older American volunteer named Buddy had joined to help me shoot some footage of the games, as Sunil had been too sick to join us (or so he said—perhaps he felt it was too risky to come). James, the British journalist volunteer who had helped us in the early days, still flew in and out of Sri
Lanka often. He came in from London specially to watch the match and donate jerseys from the Leeds United soccer team.

When we arrived at the gate of the Sri Lankan Air Force base in Galle, where we were to load the plane for Jaffna, the singing stopped. A hush fell over the bus and tensions rose as the players confronted the serious side of this expedition. The airplane ride to Jaffna was tense. When we landed at the Air Force base, Army guards with Uzi submachine guns whisked us onto a bus and drove us through deserted towns and overgrown vegetation to a small hotel for a short rest.

Our first game was against the Tamil team on Tamil territory. We rode a bus out to their stadium without any military protection, unloaded quietly, and nervously approached the arena. There we saw thousands of bicycles parked outside, as well as one United Nations peacekeeping jeep. The huge Tamil players formed a line outside the stadium to welcome us. For the first time in thirty years, the two enemies shook hands. Many of the players had had family members killed by relatives of the opposing team. They sized one another up, then the Tamils ushered us into a small changing room where the players could prepare themselves for a different sort of war.

The Sri Lankan and Tamil Tiger soccer teams shaking hands before the game

When our little homegrown soccer team walked out onto the field ready to play, there were 4,000 men standing around waiting for the game, which was now behind schedule. The Tamil mayor and the head of the Jaffna Soccer Federation made welcome speeches and placed beautiful flowers around Oscar’s neck. The referee came out onto the field and I noticed that he was one of the Tamil Tiger terrorists from the negotiations the week before. He was as strong as a bull and quite a good-looking, rugged man. I found myself blushing as we met eye to eye. I had a thing for warriors. But one point was clear: We wouldn’t be arguing with his calls.

The players did a brief warm-up and then it was game on. The Tamil players were taller and a lot older than our players, but they were all good fighting machines. The crowd watched quietly, careful not to betray which side they were rooting for just in case the secret police were nearby. Oscar ran up and down the sidelines screaming his head off like a crazy Sicilian soccer coach. James sat in a chair on the sidelines playing the English commentator. “They are too bloody good!” he yelled out in a stiff British accent. Dr. Novil attended to a player who had just passed out.

I scanned the crowd for potential trouble and saw that Buddy had gone missing. He had offered to shoot the game on my little video camera, assuring me that he had been the video guy at his church. What I didn’t know was that Buddy was a heavy drinker
and had started boozing at breakfast. By now he was toast. I found him passed out under a tree, his mind dancing with mermaids, and I took over filming the game myself. Later, when we looked at his footage, we saw a lot of images of ground and sky.

It was a great game and both sides played well, while the civil war was put on hold for ninety minutes. The opposing Tamil team won 3–0, but I’d never been to a sporting event where I had wanted the other team to win more. Not because I didn’t think we would get out alive if we won, but simply because they needed it more. The Tamil team showed off their unrepressed excitement by screaming chants and holding the huge silver trophy Oscar had brought high in the air. Our losing Sinhalese players sat around in disappointment. But back on the bus, Oscar told them he was proud of them and spoke about its being a historic day for Sri Lanka with the two enemies coming together for one common reason.

We held a party for both teams back at our hotel in Jaffna. Oscar gave everyone Football Without Boundaries T-shirts to wear, and the spirit of unity continued on into the night as we all wore matching shirts and celebrated together. The Sinhalese sang traditional songs in their language and the Tamil sang songs back in their language. James, Oscar, and I looked at one another in sheer amazement, relishing the fact that we had pulled off this event without bloodshed. The Tamil terrorists and the Sri Lankan generals had held true to their word and stayed away.

The players started to get drunk, and the Tamil leaders thought it best to quit while we were ahead. As they left, they told us that they had never had a game or celebration like this in their lives. They were giddy with happiness. Now that the special day and night were over, they had to work out a way to sneak back
across the borders without being captured. I blushed at the cute Tamil referee as he said good-bye, and watched him walk out of my life.

The next day, we woke up early and traveled by military escort to the large base where we would be playing the Sri Lankan Army team. The whole Army had turned out to watch. Thousands of the corps and engineers stood around the field in the roasting sun, while the commandos, generals, and other high-ranking officials sat under the trees in full uniform and maroon berets. The event was charming and civilized. We ate tiny tea sandwiches served by men wearing white gloves, a ritual left over from the British colonial days. With so many people watching the game, I wondered if anyone was left out there to fight the war.

From the moment the game began, it became apparent that we were the stronger team. By the second half, we were so far ahead that I walked over to Oscar and told him to take it easy so as not to embarrass our hosts. Oscar pulled some of the better players from the field and let the weaker ones have a go. Still, we won the game 5–0.

After the match, we met with more generals, and then were taken to a special holding area. It was a garden with a huge tree in the middle of it. I think they put us there to protect us until our plane left. We drank and ate to our hearts’ content and soon the players began break-dancing.

Before Oscar and I had left for New York, my cousin Christine had given Chamilla $1,000 to start a communications center that sold fresh smoothies, which she called the Tsunami Juice Café. She used the money to buy a fax machine, blenders, and outdoor tables and chairs. Oscar and I were pleased to frequent the business when we returned to Peraliya, feeling happy for Chamilla’s new lease on life. I was on a tight budget, as always, living off small donations from my family and friends, so I couldn’t invest any money in Chamilla’s cause. But I always directed new volunteers and visitors to her café, and I’d stop by as often as I could. Instead of paying forty cents for an item, I would leave five dollars on the table. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could afford, and I certainly thought Chamilla would see it as a gesture of goodwill.

One day at the Tsunami Juice Café, Chamilla brought me a large, frothing drink and served it up with a cat’s meow, as sweet and caring as could be. I took a sip, but the drink tasted disgusting so I poured it out on a plant when she wasn’t looking. Later, Chamilla’s brother told me that the drink she’d given me had
something in it. He said that Chamilla felt my regular, if small, donations were a pathetic act on my part. She believed that I had thousands of dollars in the bank and was refusing to help her. Even so, in a sort of wishful, delusional way, I continued to defend and love her.

When Oscar and I first arrived in Peraliya, we were thrown into the responsibility of running an IDP camp for more than 3,000 people. That took priority in our lives. There was so much devastation and loss around us that it sucked all the love and energy out of me daily. My only quality time with Oscar would be a quick dinner before we passed out at night.

Oscar had also become more and more agitated lately. Relationships can be difficult enough to manage in your hometowns, but take someone you thought you knew thousands of miles away and add a billion more pressures, and you might meet an entirely new person. Oscar had started raising his voice and cursing at me in front of volunteers and villagers, which disturbed me deeply. I understood that he was more prone to outbursts than I was—he was from a Sicilian family that was accustomed to yelling. I had been raised in a quiet atmosphere where people raised their voices only if they were in danger. When I first visited Sicily, I had watched in shock as Oscar’s really sweet family argued around the dinner table. I pleaded with them to stop fighting. They looked at me in surprise. They weren’t fighting, they explained. This was just the way they communicated.

Nevertheless, Oscar and I enjoyed many beautiful moments in Sri Lanka, sharing brilliant sunsets and swimming with turtles at the beach. We took motocross bike rides into the jungles and led the weekly swimming days with the children. Oscar was
passionately committed to our work in Peraliya, and this bonded us together. During our time there, a deeper friendship developed between us, one based on respect for what we were achieving each day. But while we had long discussions about how to improve the village, we never spoke about the tensions between us. Whenever we went far away from the village, he seemed to relax and the old, fun Oscar would return. But once we were within a twenty-mile radius of Peraliya, his negative emotions would swell again.

Now that we were the only two volunteers left in Peraliya village, we were spread especially thin, between running CTEC and the rebuilding activities. Oscar was operating at full speed, trying hard to right a hundred wrongs, but things weren’t right between us. We harbored a quiet anger toward each other. But then again, we understood that we only had each other.

One day in late August, I received an urgent phone call from Oscar saying that he had been hurt in a motorbike accident. He pleaded for me to come quickly, telling me that he was on the main street of Hikkaduwa. My heart throbbed like a jackhammer as I raced on my scooter to help him. My bike had a top speed of sixty miles per hour. I spoke to it like a racehorse, telling it to hurry up. I almost fell off a few times as I charged along the highway, overtaking everything in my way.

The Hikkaduwa main road was busy and long, so I raced right past Oscar without seeing him. When I couldn’t find him, I doubled back. I did this a few times before I finally spotted him outside a medical clinic getting help. I thanked God he was alive and rushed over to examine his hurt leg. He said that the bus had pushed him into another motorbike coming toward him, and that both drivers had been thrown off their bikes. Oscar was very lucky to be alive; usually an accident with a bus in Sri Lanka
meant death. As he finished telling me his story, I became faint and nearly passed out. I sat down on the ground in shock. I had been dealing with everyone else’s deaths for months, but this had happened to the person closest to me.

We took a van to a hospital in Galle to get an X ray of Oscar’s leg. Upon arriving there, I noticed a clothesline where washed latex gloves hung out to dry for reuse later. Not a good sign. Inside, we recognized many of the doctors and nurses who had come to help us at the Peraliya field hospital and they were very friendly to us. Oscar’s foot and leg had three fractures and he had open wounds going deep down to the bone, which would have to heal before the plaster could be put on his broken foot.

In Sri Lanka, there were always two prices for everything, from a visit to a national park, to hotel accommodations, to food in restaurants: Sri Lankan price and tourist price. We were used to paying the local price with our Sri Lankan friends in our village, but when we were alone on the road, we were always overcharged like tourists. The local hospital bill came to 220 rupees, equivalent to about twenty-two dollars U.S., and the officials should have charged us that price since they knew us and were familiar with our work in Peraliya. Instead they charged us the full tourist price, which added up to a few hundred dollars that we didn’t have.

A week before the accident, Oscar and I had moved from Hikkaduwa to a jungle house inland. We wanted to be in a quieter area away from the villagers who turned up at our guesthouse daily to beg for money. It was a classic Sri Lankan home and had a beautiful garden full of exotic fruits and flowers with a little Buddha shrine in the middle of it.

I brought Oscar back to the jungle house to recuperate after his accident. He wasn’t a happy patient, completely helpless and
confined to a couch. He couldn’t get up on his own or even hop around, as it would pull on his stitches and they would start to bleed. Thankfully Sunil offered to help me out. The two of us would have to carry Oscar in his full weight to the toilet and to bed. When Sunil wasn’t around, I had to lift him on my own. He was an extremely heavy patient and it made my back ache. What’s more, I was now completely alone in the village. I was torn between three worlds: running the tsunami center, opening businesses, and racing back and forth to care for Oscar. I tried to keep him satisfied, but there was no consoling him, and his words to me now were always harsh and full of pain. I had been in war zones, famines, earthquakes, floods, and poverty-torn countries and had been charged by hippos and lions in Africa, but looking after Oscar turned out to be the most trying experience of all.