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 th
e 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.
I devoted most of my time and energy to the makeshift hospital, where we were seeing over a thousand patients a day. I tied my hair back under a white scarf and drew a red cross on it so that people would know to come to me for first aid. I found a Dutch doctor and two nurses at the Hikkaduwa guesthouse, where a steady stream of volunteers were now arriving, and recruited them to join me. They had acquired several doses of the tetanus vaccine, and I stored the precious serum in a bucket filled with ice that I bought from a town vendor. I carried that blue bucket with me everywhere, making sure the ice didn’t melt so the batch wouldn’t go bad.
Not long after that, I met two young German doctors, named Sebastian and Henning, at the guesthouse. They were fresh out of medical school and became valuable members of our team. Henning was brilliant at translating the names of the various drugs that were donated by volunteers from all over the world. He built a medicine cabinet and carefully separated and labeled all the drugs. Sebastian created a mobile ambulance out of a tiny three-wheeled vehicle called a tuk-tuk. He placed a German paramedic sticker on the side to make it appear more official, but it still looked like a big toy. Tuk-tuks were the main mode of transportation in the area and were a cheap way to get around. They had no doors, and it could get quite breezy at high speeds. Sebastian and Henning drove off to faraway villages treating people and would sometimes drive them back to the field hospital for further help. Later, Sebastian bought the hospital a refrigerator, which proved to be a major turning point because it allowed us to store important medicines.
As I worked in the hospital, mothers told me heart-wrenching stories of the children who were washed from their arms. I remained strong as my translator stumbled through broken dialogue and women cried into my chest.
I came down with a 103-degree fever for a few days and perspiration flooded my body. Still, I felt there was no time to stop and rest. The villagers had larger problems than mine.
Children surrounded the hospital all day long begging for milk, and when they didn’t get my attention, they would pinch my arm or leg really hard until I screamed out in pain and turned to notice them. I had brought paper and pencils with me, which I gave to the children to keep them busy. They started drawing tsunami images with dead bodies and giant waves destroying their homes. I hung the pictures on the hospital walls and the kids drew hundreds more.
Wherever we went, we recruited tourists and expatriates living on the island to come work in our village. In addition, word of our field hospital had spread throughout the region, so people would just show up at our village to offer help. Sometimes volunteers would offer us $100 in cash, but we would give them a list of supplies instead. They would turn around and drive miles inland to find stocked stores, returning by the end of the day like Santa Clauses, bearing bags of the goods we needed. Many journalists who were in the region to report on the situation were so affected by the devastation that they crossed the professional line and started working with us as volunteers or left money for us to buy food.
We soon realized that we had to establish a management system for our relief efforts. On the first day, we had met the village chief and a number of other responsible men. Oscar and Bruce held regular meetings with them through our translator, Chamilla. Together, they formed committees for food distribution and other basic tasks, and chose organizers to be in charge of each one. They drew up long lists of the families in the village to make sure people didn’t double up on aid and that everyone was treated fairly. Each day, Oscar and Bruce would hold a meeting with heads of the various committees to discuss camp problems.
Temporary shelters were popping up all over the village, but we were in a race to get people under some sort of roofing before the monsoons came flooding through in March. Bruce serendipitously acquired a large shipment of tents that an NGO had dumped somewhere farther up the coast. Oscar and his committees distributed these to families in the village.
The housing situation improved again when a group from the Danish government called Danish People’s Aid came to town and pledged to pay for 700 temporary wooden shelters if we could help provide manpower to build them. Naturally, we said yes. The much-needed temporary shelters were ten feet wide by twelve feet long and often had to house fourteen family members. They were supposed to last only until permanent homes could be arranged. The committees gave temporary housing first to pregnant women and those who had been seriously injured; the rest was based on a lottery system. Even though the shelters had four walls, the villagers still had nothing to put inside. We took a photo of each family to hang on their wall as a new beginning.
In late January, we moved into a new guesthouse that was a dollar a night cheaper, which meant a lot to us at that point. At night we would collapse in excited exhaustion and drink beers and king coconuts around a bonfire on the beach. There were more stars out than could ever be counted.
The town of Hikkaduwa, where our guesthouse was located, was slowly reopening, in large part thanks to the help of the U.S. Marines who were on vacation from the Iraq war. We invited them to Peraliya and asked for satellite photos of the area to see how much damage had been done. The photos revealed that the village was now four feet below sea level, which meant that the area would continually flood. The Marines were in Sri Lanka to restore government facilities and hotels, so unfortunately they didn’t have permission to help us clear land. But they did boost our morale and play volleyball with the children in front of the hospital.
Oscar, Donny, Bruce, and I were so overloaded with work that we usually wouldn’t even stop to eat during the day. The food in the village was spicy and strange-tasting anyway, and large bugs and other unrecognizable materials would fall into it. So we lived mostly on bananas and the local king coconuts, which were extremely large green and yellow coconuts with clear milk and witho
ut the strong coconut taste. Known to cure more than forty-eight diseases, they also made an excellent moisturizer and hair conditioner.
A few mom-and-pop food operations started opening up at the local guesthouses, and they would cook meals for the volunteers. The only problem was that if many hungry volunteers descended on one guesthouse at the same time, it could be hours before we ate. The guesthouse cooks would prepare only one meal at a time and present it to the person before going back inside to cook the next meal. By the time the fourteenth volunteer received his meal, it would be three hours later. I thought it was a very strange way to do things, but we learned to make it work for us by dropping off our dinner orders at least five hours before we planned on eating.
On one particularly busy day at camp, hundreds of children swarmed about the hospital while the adults had their heads deep in worries. Then an Israeli volunteer group came through the village and started playing games with the children designed to release trauma. They were fantastic. The games included a laughter circle where we would all point at one another and laugh, as well as a mime circle where we would pretend to throw gigantic balls at each other. Oscar joined in to play. He would fall on the ground and grunt loudly, leaving the children in hysterics. We linked hands at the end and cried tears of happiness. It was the first time we had heard the children laughing and singing.
That night, we invited the Israeli volunteers to stay at our guesthouse. Some very fine red wines surfaced from their luggage. The Israelis knew firsthand about trauma and what people needed after a long day in the field. We invited them to stay with us longer.
On one particularly hot day, we decided to take the children out of the village and across the road to the ocean for a swim for the first time since the tsunami. We wondered if the children would ever trust the sea again. Oscar led the way, putting on his snorkel and flippers and blowing his whistle. Hundreds of children, parents, volunteers, cats, dogs, and drunks excitedly followed. We crossed the highway and stood on a small piece of soil above the beach. The Israeli volunteers gave the children a large piece of rope with colored flags on it, and they held hands and began to sing and dance in a circle. After that, we headed onto the rocks and climbed down to the sand. I looked back to where we had been singing and realized we’d been on top of the unmarked graves of the 3,000 local tsunami victims. Nobody seemed to have noticed or minded that we had literally been dancing on people’s graves. I liked the idea that a joyful ceremony had spontaneously erupted at that very spot.
The Third Wave Page 6
