He wasn’t at all what we had expected. He turned out not to be funny at all, but rather loud and rude. He raved madly about President Bush, oil wars, child abuse, and suicide rates, while we sat around in a quiet gloom. I ate my meal in silence until I couldn’t hold back anymore. Then I told him that we were all experiencing hardships and asked if he would please talk about something positive. The clown changed his tone and began reciting a highly provocative love poem. It was clear that his painfully awkward performance was directed at me. He moved his lips around like a horse chewing hay and stared with wanton lust into my eyes. I broke his gaze and felt like throwing up. We finished the meal quickly and escaped from the depths of despair. Along the way back to our guesthouse, we agreed that he been the angriest, most depressing clown we had ever met. With that thought, we at last burst into laughter, which saved the day.
I have always believed in good and evil. At least, those were the words I used to wrap my head around what was going on in Sri Lanka. Things were “good” when we were moving forward and all was in harmony with the universe. “Evil” was anything that stopped us from accomplishing our goals, unless there was a good reason for it.
I went further and called the evil obstacles “the snake.” My ideas of the serpent emerged from Bible stories I’d heard during childhood, in which the snake tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden. The snake represents many things in different cultures, but for me, it stood for the opponent that I was determined to conquer with love. It was not a physical, slithering snake, but rather the feeling of the presence of evil.
Those days, Peraliya felt to me like the original Garden of Eden, only overrun by snakes. My fellow volunteers—who were atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and from other faiths—all seemed to agree that Sri Lanka held some great magnetic pull that was beyond any earthly being’s control or explanation. Our highs and lows were more extreme than anything we had felt before in our lives. I battled the snake on a daily basis and it reared its head in unexpected places, from threats from former friends to talk of attacks by suicide bombers. I told the other volunteers that showing unconditional love to people who hate you confuses the hell out of them, and in the end they always give up. But that snake wrapped its scales around us at every turn. It seemed sometimes that no matter how hard I tried to show unconditional love and compassion, the snake spat its venom upon me.
Then, about four months into our journey, I experienced a major shift in my attitude. The “snake” stopped affecting me as much, and I was able to direct my focus toward the bigger picture. I realized that the tsunami was not an act of war, and that therefore the villagers had nobody to be angry at or blame for their lives having been ruined. If a woman wanted to scold me because ten of her babies were dead, then so be it. I knew she wasn’t really mad at me and that I shouldn’t take it personally.
It felt like I had reached a new level in my spiritual journey. Once I let go of my ego, the things people said didn’t hurt me anymore. It gave me a new sense of freedom, like I had just reached outer space and was free-falling. At Ground Zero, I had conquered my fear of death. In Peraliya, I conquered my fear of evil.
For example, one day while I was working at the hospital, two villagers raced in with ghost-white faces and said that they had to speak with me at once. They explained that the head gang leader of a nearby village had threatened to kidnap me. They pleaded with me to flee the Galle region for a while and seek refuge in Colombo or even return home. Instead, I did exactly the opposite: I insisted that the villagers take me to meet this gang leader face-to-face.
The villagers and I hopped into a volunteer’s car and drove to the neighboring village. We pulled over when we came upon the group of young men whom the villagers identified as the villainous gang. I picked out the guy who was clearly the leader, sitting on a tree stump with a smug look on his face. I wasn’t afraid or intimidated. I was pissed off. I felt my brain switch into a tougher, New Yorker mode, totally capable of kicking ass and unwilling to put up with anyone else’s garbage.
I jumped out of the car and walked over to stare directly into the gang leader’s eyes. “Do you want to kidnap me?” I asked. “Here I am.” He wouldn’t even make eye contact, but slunk away with his buddies like the cowards they were. I never heard from or about them again.
With that incident, I earned my reputation as the Angel of Galle, someone who was not to be messed with.
Oscar and I literally hadn’t had a day off in months and were showing signs of total exhaustion. When you cry at a sunset or start putting your clothes on inside out, it’s time for a break. Oscar was visibly cranky all the time lately and the smallest thing would set him off. We decided we needed a few days far away from the stresses and strains of the IDP camp. A wonderful volunteer named Sir Ed Artis mentioned that he had been given a free suite at a fancy hotel in Colombo and suggested that we use it.
It was like going from a toilet to a palace. Colombo was bustling and the expensive hotels were filled with wealthy people and representatives from very large NGOs. Some of the best-funded NGOs were paying $500 a night for these five-star lodgings and parking their brand-new imported jeeps in the hotel driveways, which made me feel a bit sick. So this is where the aid money, or at least a sizable chunk of it, is going, I thought to myself.
Oscar and I settled into our room. We experienced culture shock when we turned on the taps and felt hot water pouring out of them. I ran a bubble bath and sank into heaven. That evening, Oscar and I went downstairs for dinner. On the hotel patio, we found a Sri Lankan country-western band dressed up as Texans singing John Denver and Johnny Cash covers. That was only the beginning of a bad night. We had cocktails on the veranda and our conversation quickly turned to the village. We began to feel guilty for being in the midst of such luxury when so many people were suffering. I looked at the prices on the menu and saw how the cost of one meal could support many families in Peraliya for an entire week. Foreigners wearing crocodile shirts and peach-colored pants surrounded us. We were tired and angry and we turned that anger on each other. Oscar yelled at me for no reason and I stomped upstairs to the room. He joined me later, but we still had anger in our hearts as we fell asleep.
The next day, we thought we would make the most of the beach, but the hotel’s equipment had been washed away in the tsunami, so we found a taxi to take us into town to look for goggles and snorkels. We drove around in an inferno with no air-conditioning for hours as the driver tried to find a dive shop. Here it was our day off, and we were spending time fuming in city traffic! We arrived back at the hotel long after lunch and immediately threw ourselves into the ocean. Snorkeling around, we discovered that the ocean bed was filled with people’s clothes and household goods. It was murky and made us sad, so we didn’t stay in the water after all.
We had just gone to lie out on the beach chairs when a Sri Lankan man came running up to us, waving and yelling, “Peraliya! Peraliya!” He was one of our villagers, who had come to the hotel to meet a German lady for a donation, and was thrilled to find us there. For the rest of the afternoon, he followed us like a puppy dog, talking our ears off about his family, business plans, and also a lot of nonsense, when all we wanted was to be left alone.
That night, Oscar and I were still feeling out of place. We went down to the beach restaurant for dinner but they had run out of chairs, so we stood there in front of our table for about an hour, looking ridiculous as we waited to be seated. When they finally brought chairs and came to serve us, they announced that they had run out of lobster and just about everything else on the menu. I had been looking forward to a good meal for months and this was just another roadblock on our two-day journey of supposed “rest and relaxation.” We ended up in another fight about nothing. Oscar stormed off his way and I went mine. We decided to leave early the next day and head back to our village.
With Donny gone, the dynamics of the camp changed. Many of the other more experienced volunteers had left, too, though a small group o
f new ones arrived from time to time. Those of us who remained buckled down to continue the rebuilding process, and homes continued to pop up everywhere.
Geoff, the sixty-eight-year-old Irishman who had been working at the village for quite a while now, took over for Donny when he left. Geoff had heaps of energy, and I have never seen anyone—with the possible exception of Donny himself—work that hard in my life. He had a sad set of tools to work with, but he got stuff done and everyone respected him.
We took to holding our volunteer meetings early every morning at our guesthouse so that we could concentrate without the villagers interrupting to ask us for things. Oscar and Donny had taken great care during the initial weeks to create lists of all the families in Peraliya, specifying how many members each one had, if there were any pregnant women, young children, or elderly people, and if they had special needs, such as a deceased primary provider or disabled person. Over breakfast, we reviewed what supplies had come in—such as temporary or permanent shelters, food, clothing, household goods, school uniforms for children, boats for fishermen, sewing machines for tailors, and so on—and looked over the list of families. We discussed problems and agreed on which families would receive what donations. It was important to make certain that families didn’t double-dip, claiming not to have received aid when they had, and also to ensure an equitable distribution of goods. We were very concerned about not leaving anyone behind during the rebuilding process.
Hospital work consumed me, but I was also being pulled down the road to another village where my cousin Christine, who had come from Australia to volunteer, had decided to start a women’s clinic with my assistance. That village, only a few miles down the coast from Peraliya, hadn’t had much help. Christine and the villagers worked hard to clean up a ruined house to use as their center, where Christine spent every day nursing wounds. The clinic was now more than 300 women strong. They enjoyed sitting around a big pot of tea and talking about life.
Christine also came up with the idea of holding laughing classes at her clinic. She is generally a little spunky, but watching her teach a laughing class in Sydney had to have been the silliest thing I had ever seen. The people stood around in a circle and forced themselves to laugh continuously, making funny faces. Her classes were quite successful in Sydney, but when she tried to laugh hysterically in front of a few hundred village women, they just didn’t understand the concept. They looked embarrassed for her and didn’t know how to react. After a while, they started laughing—at her, not with her, but at least they were laughing.
Bruce was involved in planting thousands of new baby coconut trees, but someone kept digging them up again at night, undoing all of his hard work. This went on for a few mornings. When the villagers found the culprit, Bruce confronted the drunken man and we braced for the first glimpse of his anger. We had never seen Bruce get mad, and we were all dying to see him lose it at least once just to prove that he was human. He yelled to the man in a loud, firm voice, “Are you the man who has been digging up the new coconut trees?” He repeated the question loudly a few more times, walking steadily closer to the drunk. When the man finally answered yes, we thought it would surely be the juicy moment we’d been waiting for. But Bruce lowered his voice and said very softly, “Don’t do that.… These trees are for you. Don’t dig up your trees. They are for your families.” The drunk man explained that he thought when the plantings grew into larger trees, the coconuts would fall on the children’s heads and kill them. Bruce reasoned with him for a while, and the moment ended quietly, much to our disappointment.
Understanding what people were trying to say to us was our biggest problem as volunteers. There were three different types of translators: the ones who would translate to the best of their ability; the ones who would say they could speak English but when they didn’t understand, to cover their embarrassment, would make something up that was often not even close; and the ones who would just translate something completely different from what we were saying because they wanted to help their friends and family first. We did our best to pick up words and phrases in Sinhalese, and eventually I did learn quite a bit, but not speaking the language was the most frustrating problem of the entire trip.
Sunil and Chamilla, our two main translators, were chameleons. To this day, I’m still not quite sure who they are.
Sunil was a handsome, thin Sri Lankan man in his late forties. A Canadian citizen, he had flown in a week after the tsunami to record the destruction. We met when he came wandering through Peraliya with a video camera, shooting footage of the debris. I asked him if he would shoot the rebuilding process for us a few hours a day, as I was too busy working in the hospital to do it myself. I knew the footage would be useful for fund-raisers and was important to record for historical purposes. There was no talk of making a documentary at that early stage, as we were just too busy to even think that far ahead. But in the back of my mind, I knew that we had to keep documenting everything and would sort out what to do with the footage later.
Over time, Sunil became our friend. At night, he would eat with the volunteers and we would laugh about funny things that had happened that day. Sunil loved to go body collecting with me and we often bonded over new discoveries of bones we had found in far-off jungle areas.
Much to his dismay, I was often forced to use Sunil as a translator, which got him into all sorts of trouble. He would try to remain objective behind the camera when the villagers talked about their problems, but they saw him as one of their own and constantly surrounded him, begging for special assistance. When he did help, he found the villagers accusing him of false things, such as stealing money or being unfair, so he stopped getting involved and remained quietly behind his camera.
For many months now, we had been receiving frequent visits from a grieving lady who had lost her daughter on the train that had been swept away by the tsunami. She lived a few hours down the coast, but made the bus trek up to Peraliya daily to see if we had found any new bodies. She had visited every morgue in Sri Lanka, inspecting thousands of corpses, looking for her daughter. I had never come across such an inconsolable woman. I tried to explain to her, as I had done with many others, that her daughter was in a beautiful place and that her spirit was watching over the woman, but I simply couldn’t say it anymore. The reality was that her daughter’s body was probably stuck upside down in a tree somewhere rotting away. With that thought, I burst into tears, making matters worse.
Sunil and I agreed that we had to think of a way to help this lady put an end to her miserable roaming of the countryside. Weeks earlier, Sunil and I had come across a body similar to her daughter’s description in both height and dress, although we couldn’t say for sure that it was her. Sunil had a piece of jawbone that he had picked up from that same area that day, to which he felt a strong connection. He spontaneously brought it home to his guesthouse, much to the disgust of his English girlfriend. (We weren’t in the habit of collecting bones for keepsakes, but every once in a while my body bags would be full, so I would slip a finger or toe bone into my pocket only to forget it was there. I’d find it weeks later when looking for a pen.) Sunil and I both had strong separate instincts about that jawbone. Our feelings certainly may have arisen more from our desire to help the woman recover than from any scientific evidence, but deep inside we honestly believed the bone belonged to the missing daughter. So I suggested that we present Sunil’s piece of jawbone to the grieving lady as a representation of her daughter to help her with the healing process.
The next time we saw the woman, we gave her the bone. We told her that she was to bury it in her backyard and create a shrine around it where she could pray each day to feel closer to her daughter. We said we hoped it would stop her agony from wandering the coast every day looking at dead bodies. We explained that there was a 99.9 percent chance that it wasn’t her daughter’s actual bone, but there was also a chance that it was and, regardless, she should treat it as a symbol. The woman followed our instructions. She buried th
e bone, and from that day on she had a place to grieve. Sunil and I were very pleased that our idea had worked.
Chamilla was the first person I met in Peraliya, and the only native of the village who spoke English. She worked hard as our translator and was extremely kind to everyone. She had three brothers, two of whom had lost their wives and children to the tsunami, as well as a baby of her own named Wassani. Chamilla, her baby, and I often would go for walks along the beach holding hands while Chamilla and I discussed life.
Chamilla played a critical role in the rebuilding of Peraliya, a job her fellow villagers never thanked her for. She served as our only translator for a long period of time, and we dragged her all over the place to hundreds of meetings. She became like a sister to me, which upset some of the village women, who turned on her in jealous rages. Their vengefulness grew so destructive that at one point I had to rent Chamilla a small place in Hikkaduwa, where the volunteers were staying, so that she could escape the persecution at night, but it only made the villagers’ jealousy of her worse. I felt terrible about the difficult role we placed Chamilla in by asking her to be our translator. But I also gave her many gifts of friendship and financial support—everything I had to give.
While working in the hospital one day, a loud voice came bellowing through the window. “Why isn’t anyone working?” the voice boomed. “Get off your butts and get back to it.” It was Donny! He had returned, and we couldn’t have been happier. He had gone home to rest and see his family for three weeks, but he knew the job wasn’t finished, so he had come back.
Donny walked around the village hugging the monks and calling out “machan” to his friends, while small children pulled at his walking stick. The villagers rejoiced as much as we did. Donny remarked that when he was walking around his hometown, no one had cared about him, but when he came here, everyone cared. It was time for a celebration. The beers and king coconuts were on us that night.
The Third Wave Page 10
