The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [25]
We were feeding the villagers one meal a day. People lined up for hours in the extreme heat just to get a piece of pumpkin or a cup of rice. It sometimes felt inhumane to me, but then I remembered that at least they were getting something to eat, unlike the thousands of others along the coastline who we couldn’t help.
Donny was in charge of removing rubble and clearing the land. He tried to teach his Sri Lankan men the same discipline he had learned in the Australian Army by showing up early for work every morning to beat the sun, but most days the villagers were just too lazy to show up. Donny slaved on with his tasks no matter how many people came to help.
Bruce was a Buddhist and felt it was important to get people back to prayer so that they could take comfort in their faith. Unfortunately, there were hundreds of bodies in the marshes near the Buddhist temple at the back of the village, and the smell of death and decomposition were strong. The foundation of people’s spiritual beliefs lay in disarray, filled with over ten feet of mud. Residents had nowhere to pray or mourn departed loved ones, which was crucial to the healing process.
So Bruce spent days laboring with village men to clean out the temple. Women brought them tea while children made games of carrying away the debris. The villagers were nudged out of their shock and lethargy by the energy and support of well-intentioned strangers, including other volunteers who joined in the effort. Bruce had brought Tibetan prayer flags with him, which he hung over the temple once the work was finished, much to the delight of the monks. Traditionally, as you hang prayer flags, you put blessings into them, and when the winds blow through them, they carry your intentions out into the universe. Bruce’s intentions were for the people of Sri Lanka to find strength within themselves to carry on, and for the souls of the victims to find their place in light and collective consciousness. I could tell how much the villagers appreciated having their temple back.
Though Peraliya was a Buddhist village, there were some Hindus and Muslims there as well. There was also one Christian woman named Chamilla who turned out to be the only local who spoke English. She became our translator and worked hard in the hospital while her husband looked after her baby.
On our way back to our guesthouse each night or on our trips to the town of Galle, the capital of our region, where we would buy supplies, we would see thousands of people still in need and many places getting no help at all. I always took my first aid kit with me so that I could perform quick services if need be. People would be sitting in the streets with open infected wounds that had flies swarming on them. The flies were everywhere; even the hospital was infested with the dirty little buggers.
Our gang tried for a while to spread out farther along the coast, delivering food, water, and medical supplies to other villages, but we soon became overwhelmed by the size of the job. We realized that we couldn’t help everyone; we were only a four-person team, and there were limits to what we could accomplish. We talked about it and agreed that we needed to concentrate just on Peraliya.
I devoted most of my time and energy to the makeshift hospital, where we were seeing over a thousand patients a day. I tied my hair back under a white scarf and drew a red cross on it so that people would know to come to me for first aid. I found a Dutch doctor and two nurses at the Hikkaduwa guesthouse, where a steady stream of volunteers were now arriving, and recruited them to join me. They had acquired several doses of the