The Third Wave

by Alison Thompson

  I lost my innocent faith in humankind that day when I saw just how cruel, jealous, and evil people could be to one another. I was inconsolable. I missed Donny and Bruce and I missed my mum, who would usually give me a hug and tell me everything was going to be fine. But I was a big girl now and I had to look after myself.

  Sunil had been taking small jobs in film with NGOs to pay for his room and board. But these days, he dedicated most of his time to helping Nuwan, the little boy who had been disabled when he fell into the pit of burning oil, learn to walk again. Since Nuwan’s father was blind and his mother was mentally challenged, Sunil realized that if he didn’t teach Nuwan to walk again, no one would.

  Helping meant that Sunil had to bicycle to Nuwan’s village three times a day, four miles round-trip each time, to make sure the boy got food and stretched his legs. To make matters worse, Sunil had acquired many enemies—villagers who thought he was making millions of dollars from his filming, when in reality he earned very little. Tribal gangs would wait for him to pass by and then throw stones at him, but they never deterred him. Sunil got medical help for Nuwan from volunteers and small charities. He often had to forcefully convince Nuwan’s father to do the rehabilitation exercises with his son. Sunil also spent long, agonizing hours at an Ayurvedic clinic, where doctors rubbed natural local oils into Nuwan’s body and engaged in painful forced manipulation of his legs. The burden lay heavy on Sunil, who often went days without food so that Nuwan could have medicine and sustenance.

  Being a cameraman was an important job; documenting images of our work in Peraliya would help us spread the word and bring further assistance back to the area. But Sunil went beyond the call of duty when he decided to help Nuwan walk again. Sunil’s example proved to me that although we all may define ourselves by our jobs or the subjects we studied at school, we actually have hundreds of skills at our disposal and can do many things to help.

  Toward the end of a long healing road, Sunil put Nuwan on a bicycle and pushed it fast along the road. Then Sunil let go. I am certain he will never forget that moment in his life. There could be only two outcomes: Nuwan would either freeze and fall off the bike, further injuring himself, or he would start to use his legs to pedal and stay on the bike. He chose to pedal. The sight of Nuwan the crippled boy using his legs for the first time since his accident, a huge grin covering his face, must have had all the angels in the kingdom smiling.

  We had celebrated Poya, the monthly ceremony for the full moon, before. In September, however, Poya was called the Perahera festival. It was a special celebration that drew tens of thousands of people to the coastline. Holidays up to that point had been quiet and low-key, but this was a different story. The festival organizers approached CTEC to set up a computer at the temple to keep worried villagers abreast of any possible tsunamis. It would only take one person yelling “Tsunami!” to cause a stampede that could lead to many deaths. Only the week before, in Iran, someone at a mosque had yelled “Suicide bomber!” and more than 500 people had been injured and several killed during the stampede.

  CTEC set up a booth with computers in the heart of the festival and decorated it in CTEC banners. The officers wore their new uniforms and handed out flyers advertising the center. It was a brilliant day with the coast exploding into color and dance. Stunning oranges and reds flashed past a turquoise sea as babies and grandparents celebrated life and death. Change was in the air. The devastated region was transformed by dancing elephants, acrobats, maidens, and conquering pirates. Hot sweet curries and spicy roti sizzled by the road. Everyone appreciated CTEC being there to protect them, and policemen kept coming over to hug me.

  A few hours before the festival, a reported 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck in nearby Myanmar, which set off a tsunami scare and sent villagers heading inland. CTEC sprang into action, quickly restoring order using their speaker systems and motorbikes. The festivities continued on through the night, with firewalking on the beach. I hung out with many of the villagers, holding hands, laughing, and dancing.

  By the end of October, with Oscar at our home in the jungle recovering, I was the only volunteer left in the village and I had begun to stand out. I would walk faster on my daily home visits, knowing that dangerous gang members were watching my every move. A gang from a neighboring village had killed a mentally unstable villager whom we had grown to love. They had chopped out his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, cutting his body into hundreds of pieces. It wasn’t safe for a white woman to be in the village after dark. I wasn’t scared, because I had nothing left to give them but love, but I wasn’t going to be stupid, either.

  After I sat on the chief’s roof one night gazing at another liquid sunset, he rode with me on my scooter out to the main road to make sure that I was safe. It was a ravishing night. I watched the palm trees swaying as I passed the new turtle hatchery. I thought about all the volunteers who had helped us, and I was filled with love for them. People from every nation had rebuilt the village together. They had come eager to help and left with sunburn, dehydration, and memories to last a lifetime.

  The continuous gossip was trying—tales of us running away with millions of dollars in tsunami aid money. These stories grew old. We took comfort in the fact that those who really knew us knew the truth.

  I continued to devote most of my time to developing the tsunami center with Dr. Novil. Meanwhile, Oscar worked on plans for the rebuilding of the new Peraliya School with the money our friend Kym had raised for that purpose in Canada. Kym had entrusted the money to an NGO called Free the Children so we wouldn’t have to worry about building matters and accountability.

  We had wanted to get started with the school right away, but unfortunately over the months the project had come across many roadblocks. The Italian government had acquired the Sri Lankan contract to rebuild twenty-three schools along the coast, including the one in Peraliya. Oscar had attended endless meetings with the Board of Education to try to resolve the matter, but bureaucracy had won in the end. After failing to convince the Italians to hand over that one school contract, Oscar and representatives from Free the Children scouted in the Tamil areas to the north, which had been devastated by both the tsunami and the civil war. They came up with a new plan to build a school in the Ampara district of northeast Sri Lanka, where it was desperately needed. The children there were among the poorest in the country. We felt it was meant to be.

  Our villagers, on the other hand, didn’t see it that way. All they understood was that the rebuilding of the Peraliya School hadn’t started yet. They wondered where all the money had gone. Explaining to our villagers that we were building the school in a village to the north because they were going to get one anyway didn’t go down too well. No amount of translation could explain the situation to them in a satisfactory manner. They felt that we had betrayed them. If only they knew how hard we had tried to make things go their way.

  In December, wonderful Christmas gifts arrived: Bruce, Donny, Sebastian, Stefan, and James had all decided to return to Sri Lanka for two weeks over the holidays, and our volunteer gang was reunited. It was thrilling to see them again. We walked around the village and met with a warm reception from the locals. “Hello, machan!” families would call out when they saw Donny. It was so good to see the villagers smiling again and saying, “We love you, we love you.” The chief spotted us walking along the train tracks and raced over to hug everyone.

  Bruce pointed out that the color was back: beautiful green grass filled with thousands of purple flowers, small palms, and mango, banana, and papaya trees. Living things had sprouted all over the once polluted destruction. We visited our favorite roti shop and invited everyone to join us for lunch.

  The days passed and the cheery hellos turned into real needs as villagers slowly pulled us aside to discuss their problems, which usually had to do with money. The purple flowers were fading fast. On closer inspection, the temporary shacks, which were supposed to be inhabited for only six months, were rotting; the salt air had eaten thr
ough the tin roofs. The monsoons had arrived late and flooding had been heavy. It was time for a restoration project.

  Meanwhile, Oscar and I wanted to find out where all the promised tsunami aid money had gone, so we embarked on a mission to the U.N. office in Galle to ask them directly. The U.N. representatives showed us paperwork documenting promised money, but the fact was that most of it hadn’t arrived. Many of the early tsunami pledges had been broken completely. Other money was sitting in bank accounts around the world, with people not knowing where to send it. Still other funds were passing through dozens of hands and being whittled away by corruption. It was a mind-boggling maze. Next we visited the Galle mayor, who also revealed that he had no clue where the money was or how to access the bank accounts—and he was in charge of the most destroyed region in the country.

  I observed that in the past week, there had been minor bickering between the volunteers. People were here in a different capacity from the early days and felt at a loss as to what to do next, although there was still plenty to do. It would take another twenty years to rebuild from the tsunami, but with fewer emergency-level needs, volunteers had more time on their hands. Many of them felt guilty about going to the beach or taking a swim, though their behavior was perfectly acceptable. The heart of a volunteer wants to go go go, but it is important to look after yourself as well.

  The situation was different for Oscar and me. We weren’t working in Peraliya anymore and didn’t even go into the village that often. Instead, we focused on larger-scale projects, from which many more people could benefit. I was still deep in work mode with CTEC to develop it along the coastline. Oscar was busy getting the school built and developing soccer and sports programs throughout the country. Our plates were more than full and it felt like our work there would never end.

  Christmas day was particularly joyful that year. We had so much to be thankful for in our lives. I had brought Christmas decorations from New York and created a special Christmas lunch for the returning volunteers at our monkey house in the jungle. We sat around a long table that we had dragged out into the garden. We reflected on the happier and sadder moments of our adventure. We laughed a lot and felt guilty about eating such a good meal when we knew that many local people were short on food. But we came to the conclusion that we had worked hard and deserved it. The friendships we had formed were strong because of what we had been through together—though we all agreed that back in our own worlds we probably would have never been friends.

  Christmas lunch with the volunteers

  The next day, December 26, 2005, would mark the one-year anniversary of the tsunami. The celebration was not quite what we had expected. Our village was shut out of its own memorial. Later I wrote in my journal: “Today they institutionalized the one-year anniversary of the tsunami. After they left, the real ceremonies began.”

  The government and the Army took over the ceremonies and excluded the local villagers along with the village monks, the chief, and all the volunteers. Also not invited was our friend, the godfather to Peraliya village, the Honorable Sri Lankan Trade and Commerce Minister Jerarj Fernandoupulle. I knew President Mahinda had no clue of his administration’s blunders, but I wasn’t happy about it. The government pageant involved a procession of expensive NGO jeeps, most of which we had never seen near the village. We tried to get into the reception area but they blocked access, claiming they were nervous about possible suicide bombers. Security was tight. The military lined the streets with machine guns and tanks, and collected cellphones for storage.

  I turned away from the swollen crowds and walked down to the beach to join the children frolicking in the water. The monsoon swells were long gone, replaced by an intoxicating sea lapping the white shore. The children were giggling around the waves. I watched them trust the sea again. They had come a long way. For the first time, I thought to myself, “They’re going to be okay.” Across the road, pompous speeches clogged the air. Then President Mahinda followed with a beautiful, well-thought-out speech, which I could just barely hear above the sound of the crashing waves.

  By the late afternoon, the government officials had left, and the villagers and volunteers headed to the beach for a private ceremony. The village women had written letters to their dead. They lined the beach with candles, bowing before them to pray and set the letters alight. It was a quiet sunset full of reflections followed by a soft night of reminiscing. I was with my new family and my mind was calm.

  We planned New Year’s dinner on the beach and hired a local guesthouse to cook for us. It was a beautiful scene right out of the movie The Blue Lagoon, with a fire nearby and candles and ferns spread over the table. Donny was there with his seventeen-year-old daughter, whom he had brought back with him on this trip. He had proudly showed her around the village, sharing his adventures. Volunteers glowed with healthy tans. Some played their guitars around the fire. At midnight, the locals set off fireworks, which exploded in ribbons over the sea. We held one another in love and made toasts to 2006. I felt alive and beautiful and I wanted everyone in the world to feel that way. This was a happiness that no one could ever take away from me.

  Over the next couple of weeks, many of the volunteers and NGOs left. Oscar and I were alone again. The tsunami recovery effort was going to take decades, but there weren’t many people left to help.

  Oscar and I made plans in mid-January to drive up to the Ampara district to visit the new school being built with Kym’s fund-raising money. It would be a two-day journey into the Tamil-occupied war zone. Tori, our Muslim Tamil van driver from our first weeks in Sri Lanka, agreed to drive us. Oscar’s Italian friend Marco, who had flown in to film with us, also came along.

  First, we stopped to visit President Mahinda in the capital. Oscar, Marco, and I waited at the president’s headquarters for many hours, but as we had arrived unannounced and many people were lined up to see him, we abandoned that mission. We left word that we were in town and booked a room at the Nippon hotel. Major Shanaka, the head of the president’s security forces, came to visit us there for a drink and we discussed the dangers of the journey ahead. He also made a call to a commando camp in the north where we could stay on the first part of our journey. We set off the next day.

  We arrived at the camp at night and were immediately surrounded by military men with submachine guns. The commandos were quite hospitable. They gave us an officer’s house to stay in and the head of the camp, Major Janaka, joined us for dinner. I was thrilled to be there. I brought up the possibility of coming back to train with the commandos at a later date. He wholeheartedly agreed but I think he may have been humoring me, even though I was dead serious. The major marked our maps with alternative roads we could take, which the Army had cleared and therefore shouldn’t have land mines on them. I noted that he had said “shouldn’t have,” which didn’t sound very reassuring.

  As we slept, we heard muffled explosions in far-off places. We rose early to get a start on the day, heading cautiously into the unknown. We passed fields of women working the crops and they waved to us as we drove by in our van. When we stopped to say hello, they giggled shyly and asked for lipstick. I handed over my MAC spice-colored lip liner to great bursts of joy, and they ran back into the fields. My newly acquired skill of speaking the Sinhalese language was of no use to me now; everyone here spoke Tamil. We drove past Hindu temples, Buddhist shrines, and Islamic mosques. In this region, I came across the most beautiful shade of green. I called it “paddy field green.” It was unlike any color I had seen before. I sat glued to the van window taking many blurred photos.

  We passed through numerous checkpoints where military men nervously approached our van for inspection. They didn’t look happy. We guessed they had probably been sitting at these posts away from their families for years. I asked them if the roads were safe and they gave us small grins as if to say, “Are they ever?” We traveled all day along the tsunami-ravaged coastline where clearly no one had come to help. At one point, we came to a jagged one-lan
e road covered in four feet of water. We let a few cars pass us and then carefully drove through the rushing river by following the same route they had chosen. We realized that these large holes must have been created by exploding land mines.

  After crossing many more military checkpoints, we finally arrived in the Ampara district in the late afternoon, just as we had finished listening to Pink Floyd’s entire collection. There weren’t many bicycles and there were noticeably fewer cars; everyone got around on foot. We were eager to find somewhere to stay before dark, so we drove to the beach area, which was the tourist part of town. It was deserted. Many of the hotels were boarded up due to tsunami damage.

  We stopped at a small guesthouse that looked functional, and Oscar and Marco walked around to find the owner while I raced over to the beach to play with some stray dogs. To our relief, the place was operational. The owner brought us drinks as we lay in hammocks watching the sun melt into the sea. He led us to tiny rooms that had hole-riddled mosquito nets and dirty sheets covering the beds. In the back, there was a tiny shower where a few drops of cold water leaked out and cockroaches crawled around the walls.

  It was tranquil and eerily quiet as we walked along the beachfront looking for signs of life and somewhere to eat. We found only one place open, where a small group of local men were playing cards. We were the only foreigners around. The meal was slow in coming, so I walked over to the beach to look at the boats. While I was there, I befriended a dog who followed me along the shore. He moved closer to me, letting out a peculiar bark I hadn’t heard from a dog before. The strange howling grew louder and the dog moved even closer. I forgot all about my “dog whisperer” gifts and became scared. I screamed out for Oscar and the dog leaped at me, knocking me down. It wasn’t friendly play; this dog wanted to mate with me and had become excited by my touch. He wanted to show me his dominance. He started nipping at my legs, and just then Oscar came to my rescue. He pulled the dog off me and frightened him away. I was thoroughly shaken.