The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [37]
I am not usually a superstitious person. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that on numerous occasions during those first few weeks of body collecting, Oscar’s motorbike would stop running for no reason at all at the very same spot on the road to Peraliya. There was nothing wrong with the bike and it was always full of gas; it felt as though something was drawing us to the area. A week later while out collecting corpses, I found a woman’s body in a beautiful sea-blue dress close to where the bike had stopped each time. The body was three feet underground, hidden by a tree trunk, and covered with sand. A small piece of the blue dress sticking out of the sand had caught my attention. After I collected the body, Oscar’s bike never stopped there again.
In mid-April, we arrived in Peraliya one day to find the ocean flooding into the tents and temporary wooden shelters. A large tide was seeping in. The tsunami had taken along with it an extra four feet of earth and destroyed the drainage system, so half of the village was now underwater. The highway had flooded, too, and traffic had backed up along the coast.
Donny took charge, stopping bulldozers along the road to help create a wall of rubble to block the sea. I walked around the village in gumboots, visiting families in their huts. In some areas the water came up to my waist, and we hurried to save beds and blankets. Sacks of rice were ruined, as was much of what the villagers had carefully collected for the past four months.
The sea continued to rise. Oscar and Bruce set up wooden tide markers behind the village to judge the water levels surging up the river. We needed new shelter fast. Amazingly, earlier in the day I had placed a business card in my pocket, given to me by a man I had smiled at in town. He was from the Salvation Army. I called him and told him that I needed forty tents right away. He indicated that they would arrive in a few hours, and he was as good as his word. We set the Salvation Army tents on higher ground. Soon the tidewaters receded, and our latest crisis was averted.
Peraliya had become a well-known IDP camp. Our hard work had earned us a good reputation along the coast and in the Sri Lankan newspapers. The villagers and the Sri Lankan papers had given me the title “Angel of Galle,” and people came from all over the country to meet me. It was quite a silly title, but sometimes it proved useful. One man traveled nine hours on a bus to meet me, bringing one pineapple with him to give to the village. When he told me he was a rich farmer, I sent him home to bring us back a truckload of fruit. He returned days later with mountains of tangy sweet pineapples. If the Angel nickname was going to help us move forward, I’d take it.
We had heard in the news reports that billions of dollars in tsunami aid money had been collected around the world. It was one of the largest fund-raisers recorded in history. But the money hadn’t reached Sri Lanka. Our project in Peraliya survived initially off our own money and funds sent to us from friends and family through Western Union, and later with donations from other volunteers and people who found out about us from friends and sent money over the Internet. My friends Melinda Roy and Taylor Poarch, for example, collected money from friends in Florida and from the dancers of the New York City Ballet to help us.
But the four of us were broke. We hadn’t paid our hotel or food bills in Hikkaduwa in months, and I was now behind in rent on my apartment back in New York, too. Then an angel from Texas named Larry Buck crossed our path. A minister, he had come with funds from his church to help the tsunami victims, as well as with a group of Philippine medics and some fishing boats. When he asked us what we needed, we answered as we always did, by requesting something for the village. But Larry