The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [32]
Life in Peraliya sped along, and soon it was February. Every day, hundreds of bored children would hang out around the hospital. They had no homes to go back to. We realized that it was time to reopen the school. It was important to get the kids back to some sort of normalcy and give them something to do during the day.
Ironically, the villager who was most resistant to the idea was the headmaster. He was a cowardly, weak, lazy man from another region and he fought against any reasonably good ideas presented to him. Another problem was that the teachers themselves were tsunami victims and many were still traumatized and getting their own lives back together. However, we knew that reopening the school was the best thing to do for the children. So we held a village vote, and the majority of locals gave the plan their approval.
Oscar, Bruce, and James started by building a small open classroom at the end of our makeshift hospital. They weren’t construction workers, so they made it up as they went along. They found large planks of wood and canvas to rig a shelter from the sun. James had originally come to help only for a day, but when Oscar thrust a hammer into his hand and asked him to finish building the classroom, he said that he was willing. When it was finished, they had matching thumb blisters in exactly the same place and were proud of themselves. Two female Dutch volunteers gave English and art lessons in the open classroom, and the children were kept busy learning all types of ideas from the Western world.
Meanwhile, Geoff Fischer, a sixty-eight-year-old Irishman who had come to volunteer for six months, led the charge on rebuilding the permanent classrooms. He had been involved with the unions back home and was a tough, strong man. He was unusually fit for his age and never wore a shirt. The local teenage boys thought he was gay, and they taunted him and whistled at him when he passed by, which pissed him off to the point of wanting to beat them up. We found it extremely funny but tried to keep a straight face as he vented his frustrations to us.
A local woman named Deebeka donated school uniforms, books, and pencils for every child enrolled in school. She had saved up to go on a holiday to Germany, but instead used her money to pay for these generous gifts.
The opening of the school approached, but one major problem remained: A quarter of the villagers were still sleeping inside the building at night. So we had to get there early in the morning, pack up the mattresses, and prepare the school for the opening day. Somehow it all came together, and seeing those beautiful children glowing in their white uniforms with huge smiles caused major tears of joy to leak down my face. It had been a difficult job but we had pulled it off.
The monks of the village performed a blessing of the school that seemed to last for days, chanting on and on in their sacred maroon robes. The children sang Sri Lankan songs in the local language of Sinhalese and everyone was in a great mood. The teachers showed up, too. They just watched the kids all day without teaching, but it was a start.
I had my video camera with me and pointed it toward the children in their new uniforms. They jumped up and down in excitement in front of the camera. I thought they were telling me about their first day at school, but much later I had the footage translated and I was horrified to discover what they’d actually been saying. One child was telling me that he had lost his mother, father, four sisters, and his grandmother in the tsunami, and was excited about being on the news and in the newspapers. Another was trying