The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [34]
The photos proved to be very interesting, so James and Juliet created an art gallery in a broken-down house. The villagers never visited, but the volunteers did. I asked a child about his out-of-focus photo, which looked to me like a simple image of the blue sea. His response was quiet and direct: He told me it was the ocean that had brought the great tsunami, which had washed away his family.
At all hours of the day and night, Donny would find hurt people along the roadside and call me to open the hospital to help them. Donny and Sebastian once came across a very bad tuk-tuk accident where a man lay bleeding to death. They couldn’t get him help in time, and the man died in their arms. Donny was never the same after that incident. He and Sebastian both cried into their beers all night.
On March 29, at approximately 10:30 p.m., we received a text from James, who had recently returned home to England. The message read: “Huge earthquake/tsunami warning/head to higher ground now!!!” Our hearts raced. The death toll from the December tsunami had now risen to a horrifying quarter of a million people, and we had seen how people had reacted to the Fisherman Who Cried Wolf, so we knew that a new warning would send them running in sheer panic. We were faced with a dilemma: save ourselves, or go to Peraliya and warn our new family of over 3,000 people of the coming danger? It was an obvious decision for us; we chose to warn everyone.
I looked around my room wondering what to save, but no material possessions meant anything to me at that moment. I grabbed my passport, flashlights, and my night vision goggles. I looked briefly out into the blackened sea and wondered what was coming toward us. Oscar and I then ran around Hikkaduwa, warning the other volunteers and hotel owners. The news traveled rapidly in a chain reaction.
We quickly jumped onto our motorbike and headed over to Peraliya. A mass evacuation was already under way. People fled on foot, carrying their babies and young children the three miles inland. We met up with the village chief, who seemed to have things under control. He was organizing the men, who had wrapped ropes around their bodies so that they could climb coconut trees and tie themselves on in case a tsunami came through. They were ready to conquer the unknown darkness of the sea. One of the men, who had lost his whole family in the last tsunami, yelled, “Come and get us, we are ready! You are not stealing any more of our babies!” He screamed like a madman, holding the rope tightly in one hand and a machete defiantly in the other.
As we followed the stream of people inland on our motorbike, villagers called out to us for help, but there was nothing we could do. We felt blind to what was coming. James in the United Kingdom was our only link to the outside world, closely monitoring the situation and keeping us updated as best he could via text messages. We urged the villagers to keep heading inland.
Eventually we found our way up a steep hill. There, at a school located a few thousand coconut trees away from the sea, the women and children gathered. The women rushed at me when we arrived, speaking all at once, weeping in Sinhalese while pushing their children into my arms. “Please save my babies,” they cried. “I have lost eight and I have only this one left.” I reassured them that they were safe here.
I closed my eyes to summon the angels I had asked for at the beginning of January. In the office, I found a basic stereo system and a few old cassette tapes, so I was able to play some classical music through the loudspeakers to calm the crowds. A villager had brought biscuits