The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [24]
One of my first patients was a very old man who I had thought was dying. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with him. I fussed over him and gave him water and let him sleep in the hospital. Hours later, the village chief came in yelling at him and chased him outside. Apparently he was the village drunk and was suffering only from having had too many drinks.
This was a symptom I now recognized and would see over and over again in the coming weeks. The local brew was called arrack. It was a strong alcoholic beverage distilled from fermented fruit, grain, sugarcane, or the sap of coconut palms. It tasted like a mixture of whiskey and rum and caused people to hallucinate when drunk in large quantities. In the weeks to come, I saw many volunteers get drunk and aggressive from it.
I ended up developing a deep affection for the village drunks, many of whom had open wounds on their legs just like everyone else did. Sometimes our local staff would try to refuse them entry to the hospital, but when I heard them fighting I would step in and gently guide the drunkards to a corner of the hospital for treatment. One of the drunk men had escaped from the tsunami by climbing up a coconut tree, and now had fifty-three infected wounds on his legs. We called him Godzilla because he always wore a T-shirt with a cartoon of the green monster on it. When Oscar roared playfully at him, he would roar back.
Many people also came in with dog bites, and I wondered if there would be a rabies outbreak. The animals in Peraliya were starving to death. There was hardly any food around for the humans, so the dogs had begun eating the dead bodies. One day I saw a dog running through the village with a human femur in his mouth. I hoped we wouldn’t have to start killing the dogs.
There were also injuries that we couldn’t see—the emotional ones. There were women who had lost eight children and were suffering immensely. We called our treatment for these people “the tsunami Band-Aid.” We would fuss over them, holding their hands and beaming love to them. Children clung to my arms in search of milk and love, but I had only love to offer. I would hide my tears behind my Gucci sunglasses and walk into a broken house to cry where nobody could see me. Then I would walk back wearing a disguise of smiles. Being strong was imperative to the success of the mission. I told myself that I could always go home to New York if it got to be too much.
At the end of the second week, a German disaster relief organization called the Federal Agency for Technical Relief, or THW, arrived in town. Thankfully, they started pumping the wells to clean the water and set up two temporary water tanks, which they tested for E. coli bacteria each day. Now the villagers at least had some limited access to clean water again. Still, we often ran out of water in Peraliya and had to scramble around the coast to find new resources.
The local tap water wasn’t filtered and our bodies weren’t used to the bacteria found in it, so the volunteers never drank it. We even washed our teeth with bottled water. We never ordered soda or drinks with ice cubes in them, as the ice was made from the unfiltered tap water and people who consumed even such a small amount could become sick very quickly.
Oscar concentrated on obtaining food and water and other goods for the village. As a film producer, he knew how to raise money and put things in order. He was now “producing” a village with the same skills he had used to make his films. One idea he had was to place young boys with donation buckets at the entrance to the village. Each day, rich sightseers from the city would drive down the coast to look at the train wreck and then leave, oblivious to the thousands of starving people standing twenty feet in the other direction. The donation bucket boys worked hard all week and collected 30,000 rupees a day, totaling a precious $300, which we desperately needed to buy the village supplies