The opening of the school approached, but one major problem remained: A quarter of the villagers were still sleeping inside the building at night. So we had to get there early in the morning, pack up the mattresses, and prepare the school for the opening day. Somehow it all came together, and seeing those beautiful children glowing in their white uniforms with huge smiles caused major tears of joy to leak down my face. It had been a difficult job but we had pulled it off.
The monks of the village performed a blessing of the school that seemed to last for days, chanting on and on in their sacred maroon robes. The children sang Sri Lankan songs in the local language of Sinhalese and everyone was in a great mood. The teachers showed up, too. They just watched the kids all day without teaching, but it was a start.
I had my video camera with me and pointed it toward the children in their new uniforms. They jumped up and down in excitement in front of the camera. I thought they were telling me about their first day at school, but much later I had the footage translated and I was horrified to discover what they’d actually been saying. One child was telling me that he had lost his mother, father, four sisters, and his grandmother in the tsunami, and was excited about being on the news and in the newspapers. Another was trying to tell me about her school friends and teachers who had died.
Oscar and I had planned a surprise for opening day. We changed into adult-sized replicas of the children’s school uniforms, which Deebeka had made for us. We wore our outfits proudly, skipping around the school grounds holding hands and visiting all the classrooms, to the delighted screams of the children. The smiles stayed etched on our faces for days.
Even after we reopened the school, there wasn’t enough space for all the kids. Most of the older children still met in large, white, stinking-hot tents. In each tent, sixty noisy children crowded together. The field hospital had become so overcrowded that many of the children wouldn’t stand in line to get help. So I would go from tent to tent examining each child’s legs, looking for infection. I would line up the students who needed medical attention outside the tents and then march them over to the hospital. The lines doubled as naughty but healthy boys snuck to the end of the line in order to get out of school. This was familiar territory to me—I had been a math teacher in Australia for six years and was ready for their tricks. I even had a few of my own.
During that first week of school, the British and German Interpol came through Peraliya looking for missing tourists in the hopes that they could return the bodies to their families abroad. But their way of doing it was offensive: They just dug up the graves, which had thousands of rotting bodies in them. Bulldozers played a round of polo with the bodies and then after a day of these Olympics, they simply dumped the corpses back into the pit and pushed sand over them. With the opening of the graves came a nauseating smell, which blasted through the village for days. It was so bad that each schoolchild had to wear a face mask in the classroom.
One day, when more than 600 children were gathered for an assembly, a local man ran through the village yelling, “Tsunami! Tsunami!” The scene that followed mimicked what it would have been like on that fateful day had people known what was coming. Children with sheer terror on their faces ran screaming in all directions. Everyone except the volunteers was in a panic. It was shocking to witness, and afterward it took us days to coax some of the children back to school from the safety of the jungles. It helped to have Oscar leading the way on a motorbike with a handful of candy.
The fisherman who had cried wolf had been drunk at the time. He assured us that he had been convinced a real tsunami was coming. But Oscar was furious with him and took him into a back room that served as a temporary jail, threatening a five-year sentence. The chief and Donny secretly freed the man after he’d spent a few hours in the makeshift jail cell, much to the relief of his family.
Oscar’s overreaction to the incident, unfortunately, was becoming more typical of his behavior. Running a village proved to be quite a power trip for him, and he later joked that he had turned into Mussolini for a while. The hard work took its toll on me, too, and on our intimate relationship as well. I gave out so much love in the village that by the time I got back to the guesthouse every night, I had nothing left to give to Oscar. I felt like a tube of toothpaste whose love had been completely squeezed out.
CHAPTER 6
By March, I had settled into a routine of waking up to a pot of tea and fresh papayas for breakfast. Then I would walk down to the beach to play with the stray dogs before heading into Peraliya.
Every day held new challenges, and with no sign of additional aid money arriving in our region, Oscar, Bruce, Donny, and I agreed to stay on indefinitely in Sri Lanka. We simply felt that we could not leave these people while they were still in so much need. I knew that my landlord in New York would be freaking out about my unpaid rent, but I felt the situation in this part of the world was far more important than my rent back home.
James and Juliet, another British journalist, started a fun photography class after school. Many people passing through the village loved taking photos of the kids, and we had often joked that we should arm the children with cameras to start taking photos of the visitors instead. James and Juliet turned the joke into reality. They gave cheap donated cameras to the children and provided extensive lessons on how to use them. They hoped that having the young people document their own family and tsunami experiences would lead to some healing.
The photos proved to be very interesting, so James and Juliet created an art gallery in a broken-down house. The villagers never visited, but the volunteers did. I asked a child about his out-of-focus photo, which looked to me like a simple image of the blue sea. His response was quiet and direct: He told me it was the ocean that had brought the great tsunami, which had washed away his family.
At all hours of the day and night, Donny would find hurt people along the roadside and call me to open the hospital to help them. Donny and Sebastian once came across a very bad tuk-tuk accident where a man lay bleeding to death. They couldn’t get him help in time, and the man died in their arms. Donny was never the same after that incident. He and Sebastian both cried into their beers all night.
On March 29, at approximately 10:30 p.m., we received a text from James, who had recently returned home to England. The message read: “Huge earthquake/tsunami warning/head to higher ground now!!!” Our hearts raced. The death toll from the December tsunami had now risen to a horrifying quarter of a million people, and we had seen how people had reacted to the Fisherman Who Cried Wolf, so we knew that a new warning would send them running in sheer panic. We were faced with a dilemma: save ourselves, or go to Peraliya and warn our new family of over 3,000 people of the coming danger? It was an obvious decision for us; we chose to warn everyone.
I looked around my room wondering what to save, but no material possessions meant anything to me at that moment. I grabbed my passport, flashlights, and my night vision goggles. I looked briefly out into the blackened sea and wondered what was coming toward us. Oscar and I then ran around Hikkaduwa, warning the other volunteers and hotel owners. The news traveled rapidly in a chain reaction.
We quickly jumped onto our motorbike and headed over to Peraliya. A mass evacuation was already under way. People fled on foot, carrying their babies and young children the three miles inland. We met up with the village chief, who seemed to have things under control. He was organizing the men, who had wrapped ropes around their bodies so that they could climb coconut trees and tie themselves on in case a tsunami came through. They were ready to conquer the unknown darkness of the sea. One of the men, who had lost his whole family in the last tsunami, yelled, “Come and get us, we are ready! You are not stealing any more of our babies!” He screamed like a madman, holding the rope tightly in one hand and a machete defiantly in the other.
As we followed the stream of people inland on our motorbike, villagers called out to us for help, but there was nothing we could do. We felt blind to what was comin
g. James in the United Kingdom was our only link to the outside world, closely monitoring the situation and keeping us updated as best he could via text messages. We urged the villagers to keep heading inland.
Eventually we found our way up a steep hill. There, at a school located a few thousand coconut trees away from the sea, the women and children gathered. The women rushed at me when we arrived, speaking all at once, weeping in Sinhalese while pushing their children into my arms. “Please save my babies,” they cried. “I have lost eight and I have only this one left.” I reassured them that they were safe here.
I closed my eyes to summon the angels I had asked for at the beginning of January. In the office, I found a basic stereo system and a few old cassette tapes, so I was able to play some classical music through the loudspeakers to calm the crowds. A villager had brought biscuits and water, which we passed around while making small talk. Many pregnant women had run inland with other children on their hips. I sat down to comfort them.
The hours trembled by. Then James gave us word from the BBC that no wave was coming to swallow us after all. Some people started slowly heading back to their homes, but others stayed inland just to be sure. Back at the Peraliya beach, Oscar and I sat with the chief and fifteen village men watching the ocean through my night vision goggles. The moon was full and soft waves licked the shoreline. The dogs sat with us, which was a good sign; during the tsunami, they had been the first to leave. The villagers had noted that humankind was too busy walking around with its noses in the air to read the warnings from the earth. The animals, on the other hand, had their noses low to the ground and felt the earth vibrate, alerting them to run to safety.
Oscar and I agreed that it had been better for us to be safe than sorry. We hadn’t wanted to be responsible for not raising the alarm. These people had become our brothers and sisters, our blood, and we would put ourselves between the wave and them any day. Now we just had to find them and coax them back home.
Later, I found out that thirteen people had died that night running away from the tsunami scare. It filled my soul with pain. I started thinking about how the region desperately needed some sort of tsunami warning system.
The very next day, I came up with an idea. The village had no communications devices—no radios, TVs, phone lines, or anything. I realized that if there were just some sort of communications center that could get the latest information, it could spread word of tsunami warnings and false scares throughout the region. I began collecting money from my parents and friends to buy small wireless radios for every family in the surrounding villages.
Bruce had found a medical intern working at a Colombo hospital, Dr. Novil, who agreed to come help us at our clinic in Peraliya. A shy, humble man, he always put others before himself. He would work long hours during the week at his hospital, and then take a four-hour bus ride to work in our health clinic on weekends.
After the night of the tsunami scare, Dr. Novil also recognized the need for a village tsunami warning system. We discussed our ideas, and he drew up some basic plans on paper for using speakers connected through wires to the village. We decided that our center should be located in the only privately owned building left standing in the village—a two-story house right across the road from the ocean. The idea was for this center to be manned by villagers on a rotating schedule. We then organized a village meeting to discuss plans for the tsunami warning system. We were pleased when the villagers showed a strong interest in the project.
Over 250,000 people were killed during the 2004 Asian tsunami; around 40,000 of them were in Sri Lanka, and many of those were in our area. There were still so many bodies left lying around that they turned up every day during the rebuilding process and regularly washed up on the beach. It was critical to clean them up, both for hygienic reasons and to help people recover psychologically from the disaster. No one wants to run into a human body part while crossing a field, and people were looking for closure by finding the bodies of their loved ones. We felt it was important not to leave any body part behind. Right after the disaster, the police had been actively involved in the tsunami body recoveries, but eventually they grew tired and gave up. So I decided to take matters into my own hands.
In my first weeks in Peraliya, I had collected bodies using body bags that German paramedics had given us. But when those ran out, I used green garbage bags and old shopping bags. I was constantly on the lookout for new body bags and called the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army asking for donations, but Sri Lanka was completely out of bags. My cousin Christine ordered some from Australia but they never arrived, so another volunteer brought us chic designer body bags from Paris.
I usually went to collect bodies alone or with one or two volunteers, but for our first large body collection expedition, I gathered up a dozen or so volunteers and headed inland, where the water had surged up a river and taken hundreds of villagers along with it. We trekked for miles with sweat pouring down our faces and backs. The German paramedics who walked with us were dressed in hospital whites, which quickly became covered in sweat and dirt.
We came to an exposed area where I saw something strange lying in front of me. At first I didn’t recognize it. It was a human body with two feet sticking up in the air. Everyone took two steps backward as I walked over to it. The toes were long and elegant, the feet dry like someone had drained the water out of them. The lower legs barely had any meat left on them, but the thighs, chest, and inner organs were still in good condition. The head was a raw skull with long black hair caressing it. I stared at it, knowing that sooner or later I would have to pick it up. This, after all, was the reason we had come.
Body collecting
I slipped oversized blue rubber gloves over my hands and unzipped the white body bag, placing it next to the body. Then I quickly picked up the legs and swung them into the bag, followed by the heavy head. I zipped the body bag up, trapping the flies and maggots inside. One of the paramedics helped me carry the corpse to our designated collection spot. Donny came walking over from another direction with his own body bag, his face looking drained.
The second body I found was not far from the first, but it was stuck in a soggy, muddy place and a lot harder to unearth. I was wearing the black Army boots that I had purchased in Soho only a few days before leaving for Sri Lanka, which felt like a lifetime ago. I craved a bubble bath and my Jimmy Choos, but instead here I was, digging up corpses under a sweltering sun.
I found a long wooden plank and placed it in the mud in front of me so that I could walk out to the body without sinking into the mud. When I reached the body, I squatted down and gave a solid tug on the head, which snapped off into my hands. The rest of the body fell back into the swampland. I found a huge stick to lift the stringy legs over to my body bag, but then the thighs snapped off. “Pass me that leg,” I said to a hippie volunteer who had come to help me. In a Sri Lankan minute (which means a long time), the dirty deed was done.
The grim operation went on for hours. When it was over, we headed back home in silence, swinging the bodies over our backs like a delivery of dirty clothes to the laundromat. Once we were out of the jungle, we collapsed in exhaustion and drank king coconuts under a palm tree. Donny threw up. He said it hadn’t been the sight of the dead bodies as much as the revolting smell of decay that had disagreed with him. This is where my Chanel No. 5 came in handy. A little under the nose took me all the way to Paris. Vive Coco Chanel!
In some villages, more than forty children and adults would watch our every move as we collected bodies. Some trips would generate twenty-four corpses, others just one or two. The bodies had millions of maggots and flies living inside of them and were mostly unrecognizable to their loved ones. I became fascinated with the bodies in their various stages of decay. They turned up in trees and drains and under rubble. Oscar came with us once, but he fell into a mud hole filled with bodies up to his waist. After that experience, he never came again. On one occasion, I found a body in a strange location at the very
top of a steep hill where no water could have possibly reached. I wondered if it could have been a murder.
Several weeks and many body collections later, I became known as the Body Collector. People started bringing me unidentified heads and legs and other body parts. One afternoon while I was sitting on the side of a dirt road with a tattered leather bag full of legs and arms hanging out of it, a little boy ran up to me and handed me an arm. I laughed out loud as I made room in my bag for it. I had to stash body parts in the school’s new bathrooms and other sneaky places at night to keep the dogs from eating them until the coroner came the next day to retrieve them.
I am not usually a superstitious person. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that on numerous occasions during those first few weeks of body collecting, Oscar’s motorbike would stop running for no reason at all at the very same spot on the road to Peraliya. There was nothing wrong with the bike and it was always full of gas; it felt as though something was drawing us to the area. A week later while out collecting corpses, I found a woman’s body in a beautiful sea-blue dress close to where the bike had stopped each time. The body was three feet underground, hidden by a tree trunk, and covered with sand. A small piece of the blue dress sticking out of the sand had caught my attention. After I collected the body, Oscar’s bike never stopped there again.
In mid-April, we arrived in Peraliya one day to find the ocean flooding into the tents and temporary wooden shelters. A large tide was seeping in. The tsunami had taken along with it an extra four feet of earth and destroyed the drainage system, so half of the village was now underwater. The highway had flooded, too, and traffic had backed up along the coast.
Donny took charge, stopping bulldozers along the road to help create a wall of rubble to block the sea. I walked around the village in gumboots, visiting families in their huts. In some areas the water came up to my waist, and we hurried to save beds and blankets. Sacks of rice were ruined, as was much of what the villagers had carefully collected for the past four months.
The Third Wave Page 8
