The Third Wave

by Alison Thompson

  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.

  The village monk and a few young local boys would visit Oscar regularly. They’d sit around and play Karum, a local Sri Lankan board game in which players flick a round, flat disk across the board by placing their finger on it. Sunil and his girlfriend, Juliet, would also come over at night to play Karum with Oscar until very late. Our landlord, who lived in the house in front of us, was suspicious of anyone staying with us after midnight. He thought they were living there and cheating him by not paying the rent. The accusation was far from the truth. But one night when Juliet had lain down on the couch to rest, the landlord burst into the house and threw her and Sunil out. A fuming Oscar called the police, who took the landlord away for interrogations. We found another house to rent a quarter of a mile inland.

  The villagers were trying to get back to their everyday lives, which also meant that gang activity was in full swing. Suddenly our village wasn’t the innocent place we had stumbled across after the tsunami. It was full of murderers, thieves, and very desperate people. The first murder of thirteen that we were to experience took place at the school, where a group of teenagers were playing cricket. The leader of a gang from the village next door walked up to one of the boys, held a gun to his head, and then shot him in the head, heart, and throat. He and his gang stood there watching the boy die. Apparently, the teenager had had words with him earlier that morning and this was the gang leader’s revenge. Sadly, villagers often settled disputes that way. The murder cases were left for the police to solve, but doing so was a lost cause: Nobody would come forward as a witness, as they feared that they, too, would be murdered.

  People warned us to stay out of these local problems or our work would be jeopardized. As it was, in every direction, villagers were begging me for money, so I found myself staying away from Peraliya altogether and working longer and longer hours in
the peaceful sanctuary of the tsunami center.

  In late August, New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina and it rocked the aid workers in Sri Lanka, especially the Americans. We felt hopeless being so far away, but we also felt that we had to finish what we had started. Many aid organizations pulled out of Sri Lanka to go help in New Orleans, but we couldn’t turn our backs on the villagers.

  Oscar, his broken foot, and I loved our new house, which was surrounded by a beautiful garden. Since it was the monsoon season, we acquired it for a very cheap price, around the same rate as our old guesthouse at the beach. It had a ground floor where Oscar could sleep and also get out to the couch area to sit during the day. In the afternoons, monkeys swung in to eat the mangoes they had picked from the trees above us. We watched them dancing around the trees and coaxed them closer with bananas.

  One day while I was working in a neighboring village, attending to a lady having a heart attack, Oscar kept calling on my cellphone demanding that I bring him food. He screamed at me through the phone while I balanced the poor lady on my arm. Then I nearly dropped her. I threw my phone on the ground in order to catch her with both arms and lay her on the ground. I attended to her for a few panicked hours and then finally made it home with some food from a local shop. By that time, Oscar was irate. He wouldn’t listen to a word about what I had been through. His curses struck the air around me like lightning striking an electrical tower. I felt numb.

  Oscar was making me miserable but I couldn’t walk away from him like this. He was crippled in a strange land that I was responsible for bringing him to, and I was the only one there to care for him. When my husband had abandoned me after my accident many years before, I had sworn that I would never do the same thing to anyone else. So I pushed on in silence and tears as Oscar’s demands grew more outrageous, reaching deeper and deeper inside myself for strength.

  Whenever I needed a time-out, I’d go to Doadandoa, my secret Sri Lankan island. I could walk out to it only at low tide, when the rushing water would swarm around my thighs. The journey was tricky to maneuver. The ocean floor had a jagged coral bottom with invisible holes in it that swallowed me when I lost my footing. But once I made it there, I was in paradise. I would stand on the large rocks to feel the ocean’s spray smacking me in the face. Friendly fisherman waved to me as they headed out to sea. On the island grew large coconut trees, and hundreds of black birds circled overhead.

  It was this secret Sri Lankan island where I went to be alone with my thoughts. I listened to the silence, and it was loud. I listened to the birds and the wind and the ocean and the crickets and the boats and the fish and the rain. I listened to the grass growing and the ants walking and the butterflies eating and the shells breathing. I heard the sun singing and the sky laughing and I heard my creator as I listened to myself. The world is full of beautiful silences if we only listen. I lay under the swaying palms like a stranded mermaid waiting to be rescued, but nobody ever came.

  When Oscar’s open wounds healed, I took him to the hospital to have the doctor set his broken foot. The cast had been on for three swelteringly hot days when a nasty infection developed between his toes. It was so hot in Sri Lanka that even the smallest mosquito bite turned into a festering wound within days. I had to treat him every few hours. After a few days, Oscar couldn’t bear it anymore. He took out his switchblade and started hacking the plaster off his foot to free his toes. It was the way he hacked at his foot that disturbed me–one false strike would have sent the knife straight through his leg. He chopped at it for hours until his foot was free. I knew then that things had to change or I would risk losing my sanity.

  I had been unsuccessful in my search for a wheelchair for Oscar. Then, out of the blue, someone gave me a quiet lead that a certain president of a Lion’s Club in the area might have access to one. However, he wanted to meet us first to assess us. We drove to his home along unfamiliar roads and down back alleys until we came to a sliding fence where guards brought us inside to meet him. We sipped Ceylon tea and made small talk. I felt as though I were participating in some type of espionage. The other men sitting around us whispered, and then the president indicated that they would be in contact with us when they had located their target.

  A few days later, we got the call: A wheelchair was being made available to us. We couldn’t believe our luck. Now Oscar would be able to get around the house independently. Months later we found out, much to our sadness, that the Lion’s Club men had taken the wheelchair away from a crippled boy. Had we had any clue at the time, we never would have accepted it. Life could be harsh in Sri Lanka.

  On the night of September 5, the monsoon rains and wind surged through the village, cutting off all the power in the area. I received a call from CTEC, which was running on backup generators: A fire was raging. A can of petrol had been knocked over in one of the temporary homes and exploded into flames. CTEC called the fire department and rushed to the scene with their megaphones to help get people to safety, arriving before any of the official agencies. Dr. Novil was managing the medical care.

  I grabbed my flashlight and put on my cargo pants, stuffing its pockets with medical supplies. Sunil and I were running out the door when Oscar declared that he was coming with us. I didn’t know what kind of help he thought he was going to be. I argued that I couldn’t take an injured person in a wheelchair into an emergency situation and demanded that he stay home.

  Sunil and I raced over to the village. The fire had already engulfed thirty homes, but thanks in large part to the efforts of the CTEC officers, the flames were subsiding. Eighty-four people had lost everything—again. Villagers walked around in despair asking why they were being punished so much. This time I began to question it all myself. I held a woman tightly as she sobbed in my arms. I was rummaging through the charcoal rubble when I recognized a charred Disney doll I had given to a family upon my arrival in Sri Lanka. It felt like hope had abandoned this place.

  Then I looked over to the road, where I spied a tuk-tuk with a wheelchair hanging off the back. It was Oscar; he had come to the village on his own to help. He maneuvered his chair over rough ground and comforted people. Oscar was lucky this time. Coming into a dangerous situation like that in a wheelchair could have cost us both our lives.

  Luckily, no lives were lost in the fire. There was one strange injury that night, however: A man was bitten by a snake. I had felt the evil presence of the snake when I arrived back in Sri Lanka from New York, and I was prepared to do battle. One of the volunteers later told me that he had left his bike on the ground when he rushed over to help, and it had been stolen. The snake was alive again, and worse things were in store.

  Driving to the village on my scooter, I felt exhausted. It was the third morning in a row that I had burst into tears for no real reason. Oscar was driving me crazy at home. When I arrived in Peraliya, the women were already complaining and the men appeared drunker than usual. The village had flooded again due to rising sea levels, and I had just run out of Chanel No. 5.

  The chief came by and suggested that I help a woman he knew who needed assistance. When I told him that I had already helped her, he didn’t believe me and dragged her over for a confrontation. When he asked her to tell him the truth about whether or not she had received help from us, she lied and denied it. I stood there feeling as though I had been stung by bees. I distinctly remembered the goods and services I had given her, including treating her wounds when she was close to death from infection. I asked her to look me in the eyes as she repeated her answer. When she again denied the help, I felt my heart physically crack. However, I remained quiet, knowing that if I proved her to be a liar, she would lose face in front of the village chief and be run out of Peraliya. I couldn’t wish that fate on anyone.

  I pulled myself together and got to work. But later that same day, when we were working in the schoolyard, a village lady came by screaming and pointing her fingers at Sunil and Chamilla. I knew her to be a tribal ringleader. She breathed fire at our int
erpreters, accusing them of being the cause of all the villagers’ troubles by not accurately translating what they were saying to us. Kumara, a regular troublemaker, stormed over in mid-argument. He yelled at Chamilla and the ringleader, telling them they should both be beaten for the things they were saying. He accused them of accepting money from the foreigners and then denying it behind their backs. The village chief joined the fray with his Communist theories. It sounded like an orchestra of seagulls.

  I sat in a nearby chair, slumped over in front of all the arguing people, and wept openly. I felt that I’d had enough and wanted to go home. I wanted my bubble bath and sushi at Nobu. At the same time, I also knew that if we left now, no one would help the villagers, and I couldn’t bear that thought, no matter how tough things had been lately.

  But the snake reared its head once more. My favorite pet, Tsunami-dog, was always at my side, and I knew that some of the villagers were jealous of the attention I gave her. A few angry drunken men made our lives hell by throwing stones at her and kicking her when she was alone. Then one day she went missing, and I walked the entire village asking if anyone had seen her. A kind villager led me to her, lying on his family bed. She whimpered like a baby and I held her in my arms as if she were my child. The villager told me that a drunken man had broken all her legs just for the fun of it. I was speechless. It was as if my own legs had been broken. I lay hugging my Tsunami-dog, my heart shredded into a trillion pieces. It was a good thing for the man who had hurt her that I couldn’t find him, because I wanted to tie him to a tree and have a thousand dogs pee on him.