The Third Wave (8 page)

Next we started cleaning out the library building, which was completely filled to the roof with broken tables, mangled chairs, and ruined books. Donny found men to help him remove the furniture, while I collected the wet books and laid them out in the sun to dry. Bruce found a ladder and climbed onto the roof to start patching up the huge holes with the tiles he had found on the ground. Steve tried to help him but realized he was scared of heights and came down quickly. The temperature outside was an inferno. Sweat ran down our bodies as we worked.

As the day scorched by, hundreds of people slowly appeared from out of nowhere. They mostly sat around under the trees in shock. I knew from the news reports that many people had lost more than twenty family members to the tsunami. Men had come home from fishing trips to find their entire families and homes washed away. Although I couldn’t understand what the villagers were saying, I listened to their stories as I worked, and found that I didn’t need to know their language to feel their pain and make them feel heard.

Meanwhile, Oscar surveyed the area. He found a Buddhist temple and walked inside to speak with the monks. Sicilians are generally good at two things: eating and getting stuff. The monks led him to a room with a surprisingly large amount of rice and spices, which Oscar asked for in exchange for medical supplies. I’m not sure if it was a fair trade, but Oscar managed to set up what he called “the restaurant” in a school classroom. Village women helped cook the food in a gigantic pot over an open fire. As soon as it was ready, hundreds of starving villagers inhaled the lunch.

Donny at our makeshift first aid station

In the afternoon, Luke, Steve, Donny, and I set up a first aid station out of the van by hooking a tent to its side, and we started treating villagers. Soon, dozens of wounded people were lining up for help. One little girl named Nardika had run so fast to get away from the tsunami that she had no skin left on her feet. It
took me two hours to clean them, and when I was done, I had a new best friend. From that day on, she rarely left my side.

Just ten hours after we began, we had treated over one hundred people, served a meal, and cleared the library completely. It was a comfort to know that hundreds of people would sleep there tonight. We called it a day and headed back to our guesthouse in the neighboring village. Over another simple dinner of canned food, we held a meeting to discuss what to do next. We all agreed to stay there for at least a few more days instead of driving farther along the coast.

Donny had a plan to build a toilet, which would hopefully reduce the risk of cholera and outbreaks of other diseases. Oscar had been standing in the middle of the highway stopping aid trucks, successfully obtaining food, clothes, and dried milk. So when a bulldozer passed by, he hijacked it, ordering the driver to turn into the village to dig a hole for Donny’s toilet.

The toilet was a simply engineered structure consisting of a ten-foot hole in the ground filled with lime, with two planks of wood placed across the top. Donny surrounded it with huge pieces of colored plastic for privacy. In most places in Sri Lanka, there was no toilet paper. It was customary to eat food with your right hand and wipe your bottom with your left hand. If you were seen eating with your left hand, it was considered impolite and unhygienic.

Days crawled by as though they were centuries. We found ourselves running an internally displaced people (IDP) camp caring for over 3,000 people. We were in charge simply because nobody else was. The other volunteers quickly came to learn the lesson I had learned at Ground Zero: If we acted with authority, people
would listen. No one ever questioned our authority. What the villagers needed now were leaders, and although we were making it up moment by moment, we kept things moving forward. There were aid organizations working in other far-off places, but this was one of the largest disasters of all time and assistance was spread thin. This was simply way too big of a crisis for the Sri Lankan government and even dozens of NGOs to handle alone.

Dead bodies in all states of decay kept turning up everywhere. In the first week, the locals quickly buried over 3,000 bodies in a shallow grave across the road from the village near the ocean by bulldozing them into a hole on top of one another and then covering it up with a few feet of sand and dirt.

Providing the villagers with food, water, shelter, and medical assistance remained our top priorities. During that first week, we used my friend Mark Axelowitz’s children’s donation money to buy water and food from stores farther inland that hadn’t been destroyed. I felt very grateful for their hard work selling hot chocolate back in New York City.

Luke and Steve soon left us, and it was the four of us alone again. Donny and I moved the first aid station into the library to shelter us from the blistering heat. We turned two bookcases upside down to make them into beds, and I put towels I’d purchased from a village nearby across them to act as sheets. Each day, the hospital lines swelled and I collected a few Dutch doctors whom I had found in the local town to work with us. News of our services quickly spread, and some people walked over twenty miles to see us. Most mornings, we would find thousands of people waiting for us outside the old school library.

I became so busy with the clinic that I barely had time to use the bathroom. Once, I was so absorbed in my work that I accidentally ended up peeing down my legs. There were pregnant
women who needed basic healthcare, and babies with dangerously high temperatures. Some people had broken arms, infections, or respiratory problems. Others had deep cuts and abscesses from glass and other foreign bodies lodged deep inside their skin. I had never sewn up wounds before, but one of the volunteer doctors taught me how.

One of my first patients was a very old man who I had thought was dying. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with him. I fussed over him and gave him water and let him sleep in the hospital. Hours later, the village chief came in yelling at him and chased him outside. Apparently he was the village drunk and was suffering only from having had too many drinks.

This was a symptom I now recognized and would see over and over again in the coming weeks. The local brew was called
arrack
. It was a strong alcoholic beverage distilled from fermented fruit, grain, sugarcane, or the sap of coconut palms. It tasted like a mixture of whiskey and rum and caused people to hallucinate when drunk in large quantities. In the weeks to come, I saw many volunteers get drunk and aggressive from it.

I ended up developing a deep affection for the village drunks, many of whom had open wounds on their legs just like everyone else did. Sometimes our local staff would try to refuse them entry to the hospital, but when I heard them fighting I would step in and gently guide the drunkards to a corner of the hospital for treatment. One of the drunk men had escaped from the tsunami by climbing up a coconut tree, and now had fifty-three infected wounds on his legs. We called him Godzilla because he always wore a T-shirt with a cartoon of the green monster on it. When Oscar roared playfully at him, he would roar back.

Many people also came in with dog bites, and I wondered if there would be a rabies outbreak. The animals in Peraliya were
starving to death. There was hardly any food around for the humans, so the dogs had begun eating the dead bodies. One day I saw a dog running through the village with a human femur in his mouth. I hoped we wouldn’t have to start killing the dogs.

There were also injuries that we couldn’t see—the emotional ones. There were women who had lost eight children and were suffering immensely. We called our treatment for these people “the tsunami Band-Aid.” We would fuss over them, holding their hands and beaming love to them. Children clung to my arms in search of milk and love, but I had only love to offer. I would hide my tears behind my Gucci sunglasses and walk into a broken house to cry where nobody could see me. Then I would walk back wearing a disguise of smiles. Being strong was imperative to the success of the mission. I told myself that I could always go home to New York if it got to be too much.

At the end of the second week, a German disaster relief organization called the Federal Agency for Technical Relief, or THW, arrived in town. Thankfully, they started pumping the wells to clean the water and set up two temporary water tanks, which they tested for E. coli bacteria each day. Now the villagers at least had some limited access to clean water again. Still, we often ran out of water in Peraliya and had to scramble around the coast to find new resources.

The local tap water wasn’t filtered and our bodies weren’t used to the bacteria found in it, so the volunteers never drank it. We even washed our teeth with bottled water. We never ordered soda or drinks with ice cubes in them, as the ice was made from the unfiltered tap water and people who consumed even such a small amount could become sick very quickly.

Oscar concentrated on obtaining food and water and other goods for the village. As a film producer, he knew how to raise money and put things in order. He was now “producing” a village with the same skills he had used to make his films. One idea he had was to place young boys with donation buckets at the entrance to the village. Each day, rich sightseers from the city would drive down the coast to look at the train wreck and then leave, oblivious to the thousands of starving people standing twenty feet in the other direction. The donation bucket boys worked hard all week and collected 30,000 rupees a day, totaling a precious $300, which we desperately needed to buy the village supplies and tools. Later, while they were counting the money back at the school, Oscar handed them each a dollar for their work. They looked upset by his action, and one by one they all put the money back into the bucket for the village fund. It was a heartwarming moment. Everyone was contributing as best they could. After ten days, the boys stopped seeking donations; the villagers agreed that they didn’t want to appear to be beggars.

We were feeding the villagers one meal a day. People lined up for hours in the extreme heat just to get a piece of pumpkin or a cup of rice. It sometimes felt inhumane to me, but then I remembered that at least they were getting something to eat, unlike the thousands of others along the coastline who we couldn’t help.

Donny was in charge of removing rubble and clearing the land. He tried to teach his Sri Lankan men the same discipline he had learned in the Australian Army by showing up early for work every morning to beat the sun, but most days the villagers were just too lazy to show up. Donny slaved on with his tasks no matter how many people came to help.

Bruce was a Buddhist and felt it was important to get people
back to prayer so that they could take comfort in their faith. Unfortunately, there were hundreds of bodies in the marshes near the Buddhist temple at the back of the village, and the smell of death and decomposition were strong. The foundation of people’s spiritual beliefs lay in disarray, filled with over ten feet of mud. Residents had nowhere to pray or mourn departed loved ones, which was crucial to the healing process.

So Bruce spent days laboring with village men to clean out the temple. Women brought them tea while children made games of carrying away the debris. The villagers were nudged out of their shock and lethargy by the energy and support of well-intentioned strangers, including other volunteers who joined in the effort. Bruce had brought Tibetan prayer flags with him, which he hung over the temple once the work was finished, much to the delight of the monks. Traditionally, as you hang prayer flags, you put blessings into them, and when the winds blow through them, they carry your intentions out into the universe. Bruce’s intentions were for the people of Sri Lanka to find strength within themselves to carry on, and for the souls of the victims to find their place in light and collective consciousness. I could tell how much the villagers appreciated having their temple back.

Though Peraliya was a Buddhist village, there were some Hindus and Muslims there as well. There was also one Christian woman named Chamilla who turned out to be the only local who spoke English. She became our translator and worked hard in the hospital while her husband looked after her baby.

On our way back to our guesthouse each night or on our trips to the town of Galle, the capital of our region, where we would buy supplies, we would see thousands of people still in need and many places getting no help at all. I always took my first aid kit with me so that I could perform quick services if need be. People
would be sitting in the streets with open infected wounds that had flies swarming on them. The flies were everywhere; even the hospital was infested with the dirty little buggers.

Our gang tried for a while to spread out farther along the coast, delivering food, water, and medical supplies to other villages, but we soon became overwhelmed by the size of the job. We realized that we couldn’t help everyone; we were only a four-person team, and there were limits to what we could accomplish. We talked about it and agreed that we needed to concentrate just on Peraliya.