The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [35]
The hours trembled by. Then James gave us word from the BBC that no wave was coming to swallow us after all. Some people started slowly heading back to their homes, but others stayed inland just to be sure. Back at the Peraliya beach, Oscar and I sat with the chief and fifteen village men watching the ocean through my night vision goggles. The moon was full and soft waves licked the shoreline. The dogs sat with us, which was a good sign; during the tsunami, they had been the first to leave. The villagers had noted that humankind was too busy walking around with its noses in the air to read the warnings from the earth. The animals, on the other hand, had their noses low to the ground and felt the earth vibrate, alerting them to run to safety.
Oscar and I agreed that it had been better for us to be safe than sorry. We hadn’t wanted to be responsible for not raising the alarm. These people had become our brothers and sisters, our blood, and we would put ourselves between the wave and them any day. Now we just had to find them and coax them back home.
Later, I found out that thirteen people had died that night running away from the tsunami scare. It filled my soul with pain. I started thinking about how the region desperately needed some sort of tsunami warning system.
The very next day, I came up with an idea. The village had no communications devices—no radios, TVs, phone lines, or anything. I realized that if there were just some sort of communications center that could get the latest information, it could spread word of tsunami warnings and false scares throughout the region. I began collecting money from my parents and friends to buy small wireless radios for every family in the surrounding villages.
Bruce had found a medical intern working at a Colombo hospital, Dr. Novil, who agreed to come help us at our clinic in Peraliya. A shy, humble man, he always put others before himself. He would work long hours during the week at his hospital, and then take a four-hour bus ride to work in our health clinic on weekends.
After the night of the tsunami scare, Dr. Novil also recognized the need for a village tsunami warning system. We discussed our ideas, and he drew up some basic plans on paper for using speakers connected through wires to the village. We decided that our center should be located in the only privately owned building left standing in the village—a two-story house right across the road from the ocean. The idea was for this center to be manned by villagers on a rotating schedule. We then organized a village meeting to discuss plans for the tsunami warning system. We were pleased when the villagers showed a strong interest in the project.
Over 250,000 people were killed during the 2004 Asian tsunami; around 40,000 of them were in Sri Lanka, and many of those were in our area. There were still so many bodies left lying around that they turned up every day during the rebuilding process and regularly washed up on the beach. It was critical to clean them up, both for hygienic reasons and to help people recover psychologically from the disaster. No one wants to run into a human body part while crossing a field, and people were looking for closure by finding the bodies of their loved ones. We felt it was important not to leave any body part behind. Right after the disaster, the police had been actively involved in the tsunami body recoveries, but eventually they grew tired and gave up. So I decided to take matters into my own hands.
In my first weeks in Peraliya, I had collected bodies using body bags that German paramedics had given us. But when those ran out, I used green garbage bags and old shopping bags. I was constantly on the lookout for new body bags and called the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army asking for donations, but Sri Lanka was completely out of bags. My cousin Christine ordered some from Australia but they never arrived, so another volunteer