The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [22]
We woke up at 5 a.m. to a beautiful sunrise and walked along the beach, staring out into the now tame ocean. Bruce cooked baked beans and eggs we had brought from Colombo. I began to put on my shoes and found a little mouse sleeping in one of them. We then drove back to the village Luke and Steve had told us about, which was located about four miles from the town where we had stayed the night.
The village, which was called Peraliya, had been completely destroyed. A forty-foot tsunami wave had attacked it and overturned a passing train, killing approximately 2,500 people and destroying 510 homes. The wave had also surged up the river and traveled two miles inland. The only remaining structures were the school library and one block of classrooms. As we walked around, villagers who had been sleeping in the open rubble came over to us. They looked like the walking dead. I found a mound of long black hair hanging on a tree. At first I thought it was a wig, but upon closer inspection I discovered it was a real human scalp, just like out of an old American cowboys and Indians movie. The force from the tsunami must have ripped it right off of someone’s head.
The overturned train in Peraliya
Nobody spoke English, so we communicated with sign language. The villagers needed clean water, food, shelter, and medical aid. All the wells had been contaminated with salt water, so we began by handing out small rations of bottled water. Children swarmed around me begging for a small plastic lid full of it, and I watched them suck it into their mouths like it was chocolate syrup. My insides twisted as I realized that the situation was far worse than I could have ever imagined. I cried out to God to send every spare angel in heaven and on earth to this hurt area of the world.
Next we started cleaning out the library building, which was completely filled to the roof with broken tables, mangled chairs, and ruined books. Donny found men to help him remove the furniture, while I collected the wet books and laid them out in the sun to dry. Bruce found a ladder and climbed onto the roof to start patching up the huge holes with the tiles he had found on the ground. Steve tried to help him but realized he was scared of heights and came down quickly. The temperature outside was an inferno. Sweat ran down our bodies as we worked.
As the day scorched by, hundreds of people slowly appeared from out of nowhere. They mostly sat around under the trees in shock. I knew from the news reports that many people had lost more than twenty family members to the tsunami. Men had come home from fishing trips to find their entire families and homes washed away. Although I couldn’t understand what the villagers were saying, I listened to their stories as I worked, and found that I didn’t need to know their language to feel their pain and make them feel heard.
Meanwhile, Oscar surveyed the area. He found a Buddhist temple and walked inside to speak with the monks. Sicilians are generally good at two things: eating and getting stuff. The monks led him to a room with a surprisingly large amount of rice and spices, which Oscar asked for in exchange for medical supplies. I’m not sure if it was a fair trade, but Oscar managed to set up what he called “the restaurant” in a school classroom. Village women helped cook the food in a gigantic pot over an open fire. As soon as it was ready, hundreds of starving villagers inhaled the lunch.
Donny at our makeshift first aid station
In the afternoon, Luke, Steve, Donny, and I set up a first aid station