The Third Wave

by Alison Thompson

  We arrived back at our guesthouse to an urgent text from Major Shanaka, with whom we had just met in Colombo, telling us there was going to be a terrorist attack somewhere in our area tonight. He was very concerned for our safety. He wanted to send the military in to help get us out. We didn’t even consider his offer. If we had learned one thing about this war, it was that the military were the biggest targets of all, and we were safer being away from them. The Tamil Tigers didn’t target foreigners. Major Shanaka then sent a flurry of anxious texts warning us that we should leave the area at once.

  We glanced around the hotel and down the coast. There was no one in sight; we were all alone. I wondered if others had known about the attacks as well and had fled to their homes. We debated leaving, but by now it was after 10 p.m. and we knew there could be land mines on the roads, so we decided to remain until first light. We were all too aware that land mines didn’t discriminate between military men and tourists. I felt a rush of excitement as we discussed our plans. I changed into my cargo pants, grabbed a flashlight and emergency gear, and lay down to sleep with one eye open.

  At first light, we packed the car and headed an hour north to find the new school. It was a tense ride. Oscar yelled at me for wearing flip-flops rather than hiking boots, wondering how I was going to run away if confronted by danger. He was right, but the nervous way he snapped at me made me cringe. I was over his bossy attitude. Along the drive, we passed through dirty, poverty-stricken towns and spied commandos walking through the jungle checking the trees. It was obvious they weren’t looking for mangoes.

  Finally, we made it to the area where they had started building the new school. Oscar held my hand and we took a deep breath, letting out months of struggle and hard work with losing the rights to build the new school at Peraliya. It had been challenging, but our sadness turned to hope as we quickly realized that the new school was meant to be here. We walked through the grounds and tearfully watched a miracle growing around us. In the schoolyard, we met some children and their parents. Tori, our Tamil driver, translated for us as we told them about Kym Anthony, the banker from Canada who had raised the money to build their new school. They were very happy about it. A little girl sang a thank-you song to Kym into the video camera.

  After we had inspected the construction efforts and met a few more people, our mission to visit the school was over. Major Shanaka advised that the roads were clear. It was time for us to get out while we still were able. We headed home safely to Hikkaduwa with our hearts full of joy. Back in civilization, we read about the attacks that had occurred the night before. Twelve Navy officers had been blown up in a bus near our guesthouse. We had made the right decision in staying put.

  In the coming weeks, we continued our work and waited in frustration for the Italian government to start rebuilding the Peraliya School, but they were nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, Kym’s Free the Children foundation had already almost finished building the school at Ampara. They also gave us a small amount of money to pay for our continued living expenses in the Hikkaduwa region and return plane tickets to the United States. CTEC was growing and we had developed over eighty community points along the coast—villages where a group of people had taken responsibility for getting tsunami warnings out to their people. CTEC had given them cellphones, radios, and signboards.

  With the programs and small businesses we’d put in place up and running, and the rebuilding we had accomplished, it felt like it was time, at last, for Oscar and me to leave for good. Separating myself from Sri Lanka would require a herculean effort, but I knew that I needed to get back to my life in New York.

  In February of 2006, fourteen months after the tsunami tragedy, Oscar and I bade a more final farewell to the villagers, the chief, our translators, the CTEC officers, and Tsunami-dog. We returned to New York for good.

  CHAPTER 13

  Readjusting to life in New York City after over a year of barebones existence in the developing world proved more difficult than I had imagined. Volunteers wrote me emails saying that they didn’t fit back into their lives anymore, and I could empathize. But I told them that it was a good thing because it would mean more change for the world in the future. I urged them not to forget what they had learned in Sri Lanka. It was also time for me to begin sorting through the tsunami footage.

  We had come home with more than three hundred videotapes of our tsunami experiences. When we had first arrived in Peraliya, we were working very hard, so I pulled out my little video camera for at most ten minutes a day. At first, nobody in the village had a problem with it. Somehow they knew the purpose was to bring further help to the area. It was only much later, when Sunil was shooting all over and for longer hours, that some villagers became suspicious that he was making money off them, although that was far from the truth. We had gone to Sri Lanka to volunteer for two weeks and we could not have known how long we would end up staying or how much footage we would end up shooting. All I did know was that I had a story to tell.

  I decided that I wanted to create a documentary film that would encourage people to volunteer and help raise money for CTEC. It would be a road map to volunteering and the message would be that everyone is needed. The problem was that we had no money. Thankfully, our friends Richard Belfiore and Dave Pederson gave thirty minutes of footage to the Supersize Me documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock for viewing. He called us and said that he wanted to be part of the film. He started out by giving us money to live on while we completed it. Morgan was a sweet, genuine guy with a passion for the truth, and we felt very fortunate to have him on board.

  Our friend Russ Terlecki found us two great editors, Cedar Daniels and Peter Demas. We edited the film in a small underground office in Chinatown, where everything cost less. We lived cheaply on fried dumplings that cost two dollars for five and tasted divine. The neighborhood was full of illegal activities, and we’d see daily raids by undercover detectives cracking down on gambling and prostitution rings. In the summer, they screened old black-and-white Chinese Marxist propaganda films in the park.

  During the editing process, we relived every moment of our experience. It was like watching a backward roller-coaster ride built with twists and turns that triggered fiery flames. It made us yearn to be back with our Sri Lankan children. When they appeared on the computer screen, I would touch it and smile. The biggest shock, however, came when the tapes were translated. We had no idea what the villagers had been saying at the time. Now we found out that while some of it was beautiful, other parts were unbelievably malicious.

  After slaving away fourteen hours a day for a year, interspersed with a few short trips back to Sri Lanka in between, the documentary was finally complete. We called it The Third Wave, the nickname for all the volunteers and aid workers who came to help after the first two tsunami waves had destroyed the village.

  The film opened in April 2007 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York to standing ovations and five sold-out screenings. We had finished it only a few days before the festival, so we hadn’t had any time to get excited about the big night. Hearing those first and second standing ovations, which went on for over fifteen minutes, was embarrassing and shocking to me. I felt humbled, remembering my suffering tsunami friends. I hoped that many people would see the film, bringing in more aid and volunteers.

  The film toured the world after that, with screenings in Sydney, Tokyo, Iran, Monaco, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles, the United Nations, and all over Asia and the United States. Every time Oscar and I appeared, the question-and-answer sessions went on for hours, and we were thrilled to find people genuinely intrigued about what really went on over there and how they could get involved in volunteering.

  In January 2008, while I was on a trip to Hawaii to visit the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, I received a call from an unknown number. A male voice said he was Sean Penn, the actor, and that he had just watched The Third Wave. He loved our film and wanted to help spread the message of volunteerism. I looked into the phone when I real
ized that it really was Sean Penn’s voice on the line. After recovering from my state of shock, I listened to what he had to say. He was going to be president of the Cannes Film Festival that year and asked if he could take our documentary there to show to the world. I told him that sounded like a bloody great plan and rushed upstairs to tell Oscar, who was in bed with walking pneumonia. When I entered his hotel room, by coincidence Oscar was watching the Sean Penn movie I Am Sam on television. I said, “Let me tell you about this bloody great plan.…”

  While preparing The Third Wave documentary for the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, I received another call from Sean Penn, who had another bloody good idea. He wanted to take a busload of people across the country, volunteering along the way. We laughed about its being a Partridge Family–style bus, where he was Reuben Kincaid and I was Danny Partridge. I hung up the phone excited, thinking it might happen later in the year, and continued with my work on the film.

  Ten days later, Sean called to tell me the volunteer bus trip was on—in five days’ time. He asked if Oscar and I would come help, and also requested that we videotape the journey. Five days isn’t a lot of time to drop Cannes preparations and go on a road trip across America, but my instincts told me to go.

  After meeting Sean at Coachella, a three-day annual music festival held near Palm Springs, California, we spent two weeks driving across the country with more than two hundred people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, camping out at night and volunteering in different cities during the day. We traveled to Tucson, Arizona, where we went on an AIDS march with the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, and to Austin, Texas, where we cleaned up the Barton Springs Greenbelt by picking up trash and removing invasive species, visited an organization that was building “green” houses for low-income families in the area, and attended a pro-immigration May Day rally. At night we’d sing and play music and stay up late talking around the campfire.

  Sean Penn talking to the Dirty Hands Caravan volunteers

  Our last stop was New Orleans, where we volunteered with an organization called Common Ground that was made up of young people from all over the country who had put their lives on hold to rebuild New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. They were headquartered in the middle of the Ninth Ward, the area that was most affected by the hurricane. Nothing could have prepared us for the destruction we saw in the Ninth Ward. There were concrete stairs leading nowhere and empty lots where houses had once stretched for miles. Each lonely stoop was a gravestone for a home. Three years after Katrina, the place was still eerie and sad. It was hard to imagine what it had looked like before the storm.

  The local people in the Ninth Ward wanted their lives to return to normal, but since we were there for only a few days, we just did whatever we could. We met a woman whose home had been completely destroyed and had just moved into a new, yellow house—the only one on the block that had been rebuilt. It was a beautiful house but it was surrounded by a sea of mud. She wondered if the volunteers would help her construct a driveway and garden, so we rallied a gang of volunteers to do the job. We set out to build a makeshift pathway from whatever materials we could find in the area. We got our hands and feet dirty and slaved in the hot sun. As the garden came together, the woman said that we were angels sent to her from God.

  Other volunteers went off to paint people’s houses and log dead trees in different parts of the Ninth Ward. Forrest, one of my favorite volunteers, went to help a woman who had recently returned to her house and had also lost her husband. He had been confined to a wheelchair before the hurricane and survived it, but he had recently succumbed to health problems. She showed the group the water stains left on her house by Katrina. Two miles from the levee, the water had reached nine feet; the scope of the flood was more than any of us could comprehend. Forrest and some others created a stone pathway, landscaped the garden, cleared rotten wood, and painted. The woman brought the volunteers water while they worked and kept saying, “Bless you, bless you, and thank you so much, you don’t know how much this means to me!” She was the only one on her street who had returned, and the neighborhood was eerily quiet. Everyone had moist eyes as they worked in silence.

  Sean took a busload of volunteers to a massive tent city that had formed under the highway. These were homeless people who had jobs but due to the lack of affordable housing had been forced to camp in the shelter of an overpass. They would wake up and put on nice clothes to go off to work, then return later to sleep in their tents. The volunteers dished out food and sat around speaking with the tent residents, offering words of comfort and just lending an ear. Another group of volunteers went to fix up an old church, and still others moved sheds that had traveled great distances with the floodwaters. A few others rode around on bicycles with a Common Ground worker, helping anyone who looked like he needed a hand.

  After the trip with Sean officially ended, a group of seventeen volunteers decided to remain in New Orleans for four more months. In a relatively short time, all the volunteers had begun asking serious questions about the world and their role in it, and many of them felt that they couldn’t go back to their normal lives after seeing how much help was needed around the country. I saw that the trip had changed them the way volunteering after 9/11 had changed me. Watching the young volunteers restored my faith in humanity. I saw how even a short trip could make a difference—how a few days spent serving food to homeless people and repainting houses was enough to move the volunteers’ lives, and those of the communities they were helping, in a new direction.

  The Cannes Film Festival was an extraordinary experience. Sean Penn was present at every film viewing and function. I have never seen anyone work so hard in all my life, and it inspired me to work harder. Bruce and Donny also came, and people swarmed around Donny, asking for his autograph and calling him the real Indiana Jones. When Donny met famous people, he would know that they looked familiar but wouldn’t realize that he had seen them in movies, so he’d often ask if they had met previously at the local football club back in Australia. This had us in stitches. We watched as Donny approached a confused Woody Harrelson, who seemed to be wondering if Donny was for real. The supermodel Petra Nemcova also offered incredible support for our film, as did many other celebrities, friends, and total strangers.

  Bruce, Oscar, me, and Donny at the Cannes Film Festival

  A few days before our film screened, huge earthquakes struck China, killing more than 100,000 people, and a hurricane also flooded Burma, leaving another 100,000 dead. The new disasters tugged at my sleeves and I wanted to go and help, but I knew it was important to share our message about volunteering with the world. On the day of the screening, Bono and Sean walked the red carpet with us. They had invited the whole Cannes jury to the show. Our film received a standing ovation and worldwide attention. I will always be grateful for the opportunity Sean gave us at Cannes. I will always be grateful for his incredible generosity.

  ACT III

  HAITI

  CHAPTER 14

  Oscar and I were practically living in a darkroom in New York City. Although the romance between us had died, we were still very close friends and were working together every day on The Third Wave and a documentary about the volunteering trip we’d taken with Sean Pean. Editing the second documentary had dragged on for months longer than we’d anticipated, and I was aching to get back out in the field as a volunteer. We finished mixing the sound and called the film a wrap on January 14, 2010. Literally that same afternoon, I heard my phone beep and picked it up to glance at the text message that had arrived. It was from Sean Penn, and it read: “Haiti??” I wrote back at once: “Yes, let’s go!”

  A catastrophic 7.0 earthquake had struck the poorest area in the Northern Hemisphere two days earlier, killing a quarter of a million people in Haiti and rendering most of the survivors homeless. Reports were coming in from journalists and aid workers on the ground that conditions in Haiti were horrendous. An estimated 300,000 people had suffered injuries
, and yet with an inept government, and the United Nations as well as other NGOs in shambles, the Haitians had limited access to medical care, food, and fresh water. It seemed like a summons from on high—one that I neither could, nor wanted to, ignore.

  For the next few days, Sean, Oscar, and I raced around like crazy, Sean in Los Angeles, we in New York City. My primary task was to gather medical professionals to accompany our relief mission. An ER doctor from Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital had coincidentally friended me on Facebook a few days earlier, asking for my advice on international aid work. He had been all set to go to Guatemala, but when the Haiti quake happened, I wrote to him and said, “You have to join me.” He and I both posted to our Facebook pages that we were seeking medical volunteers, and within days we had ten doctors on our team. A couple of them were even Haitian and spoke Creole (Kreyol). My friend Randy Slavin and his mother, Nava, donated thirty boxes of medical supplies, including medications and equipment. Meanwhile, Sean raised half a million dollars from Diana Jenkins, a former Bosnian refugee who has devoted her life to humanitarian causes.

  In the wee hours of January 17, Oscar, the doctors, and I set off from New York City in a private jet my fabulous friend Lisa Fox had arranged for us to borrow from the designer Donna Karan. Donna donated not only her plane but also a stretch limo to pick us all up, vials of essential oils, and fifty blankets to keep us warm at night. Lisa’s young son gave me twenty dollars to give to “the sad boy” he had seen on CNN.