The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [33]
Oscar and I had planned a surprise for opening day. We changed into adult-sized replicas of the children’s school uniforms, which Deebeka had made for us. We wore our outfits proudly, skipping around the school grounds holding hands and visiting all the classrooms, to the delighted screams of the children. The smiles stayed etched on our faces for days.
Even after we reopened the school, there wasn’t enough space for all the kids. Most of the older children still met in large, white, stinking-hot tents. In each tent, sixty noisy children crowded together. The field hospital had become so overcrowded that many of the children wouldn’t stand in line to get help. So I would go from tent to tent examining each child’s legs, looking for infection. I would line up the students who needed medical attention outside the tents and then march them over to the hospital. The lines doubled as naughty but healthy boys snuck to the end of the line in order to get out of school. This was familiar territory to me—I had been a math teacher in Australia for six years and was ready for their tricks. I even had a few of my own.
During that first week of school, the British and German Interpol came through Peraliya looking for missing tourists in the hopes that they could return the bodies to their families abroad. But their way of doing it was offensive: They just dug up the graves, which had thousands of rotting bodies in them. Bulldozers played a round of polo with the bodies and then after a day of these Olympics, they simply dumped the corpses back into the pit and pushed sand over them. With the opening of the graves came a nauseating smell, which blasted through the village for days. It was so bad that each schoolchild had to wear a face mask in the classroom.
One day, when more than 600 children were gathered for an assembly, a local man ran through the village yelling, “Tsunami! Tsunami!” The scene that followed mimicked what it would have been like on that fateful day had people known what was coming. Children with sheer terror on their faces ran screaming in all directions. Everyone except the volunteers was in a panic. It was shocking to witness, and afterward it took us days to coax some of the children back to school from the safety of the jungles. It helped to have Oscar leading the way on a motorbike with a handful of candy.
The fisherman who had cried wolf had been drunk at the time. He assured us that he had been convinced a real tsunami was coming. But Oscar was furious with him and took him into a back room that served as a temporary jail, threatening a five-year sentence. The chief and Donny secretly freed the man after he’d spent a few hours in the makeshift jail cell, much to the relief of his family.
Oscar’s overreaction to the incident, unfortunately, was becoming more typical of his behavior. Running a village proved to be quite a power trip for him, and he later joked that he had turned into Mussolini for a while. The hard work took its toll on me, too, and on our intimate relationship as well. I gave out so much love in the village that by the time I got back to the guesthouse every night, I had nothing left to give to Oscar. I felt like a tube of toothpaste whose love had been completely squeezed out.
CHAPTER 6
By March, I had settled into a routine of waking up to a pot of tea and fresh papayas for breakfast. Then I would walk down to the beach to play with the stray dogs before heading into Peraliya.
Every day held new challenges, and with no sign of additional aid money arriving in our region, Oscar, Bruce, Donny, and I agreed to stay on indefinitely in Sri Lanka. We simply felt that we could not leave these people while they were still in so much need. I knew that my landlord in New York would be freaking out about my unpaid rent, but I felt the situation in this part of the world was far more important than my rent back home.
James and Juliet, another British journalist, started a fun photography class after school. Many people