The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [38]
CHAPTER 7
The villagers in Peraliya had also heard about all the international aid money raised and started wondering what had happened to it. They began accusing one another of having it and not sharing it. Inevitably, their accusations turned to us. We tried not to give money out in front of people and would usually spend it on goods for the village as a whole rather than on individuals. But every now and again, a story would break my heart and I would quietly slip a few dollars into someone’s pocket for a pair of eyeglasses or heart medication. By the time I had walked back to the hospital, the rumors would already be buzzing that I had given away $10,000.
Whenever we gave out free goods, such as clothing, it caused a lot of trouble. The women would line up in the hot sun for hours while the village men sat under the coconut trees drinking arrack. The women would sometimes get aggressive, pushing one another to be first in line and then fighting over the goods, often ripping the donations in half. When I ran out of clothes to give away, sometimes they would spit on me.
On one occasion, I had only forty-five mosquito nets but more than 300 women waiting. Everyone wanted a mosquito net, and when there were no more left, the women attacked, scratching and bruising me. I had had enough of their bickering and jealousy, and I wanted to show them how disgusting their behavior looked. So I started screaming like a wildcat, swinging my arms out in front of me with sharp nails clawing into the air.
The women stopped in shock. There was a quiet pause followed by great howls of laughter when they realized I was mimicking them. The group dissolved in shame … only to start right back up again the next day. I made the decision then that I wasn’t going to be the one to physically give out aid anymore; someone crazier than me would have to deal with that hell.
The adults were behaving like children and the children were behaving like adults. When asked if they had received food that day, the adults would lie and say no, just so they could get more free stuff. We learned to ask the children first because they always told us the truth. Sometimes when the villagers complained too much at the clinic, I would lock the door and walk away down the railway tracks. The children would run after me surrounding me with love, telling me that I was helping them and that the grown-ups were bad. They would all try to kiss me at once, which melted my soul, and I would walk back to the hospital for business as usual.
Somewhere in the growing-up process, we lose our way and become too complicated. We teach our children not to fight and to love one another but we don’t do that in our own adult lives. I learned a great deal from the children in Peraliya: They taught me the importance of spontaneity, the ability to pick up and move on, to adapt, to forgive, and to trust.
With Nardika (far left) and her sisters
When the weather was too rough to swim in the ocean, we paid off a local hotelier to let the kids swim in his pool during our Sunday outing. Usually it was prohibited for locals, but when no tourists were in town he agreed to it. We had so much fun swimming in the pool, but the kids would jump on top of me with their lice-ridden hair tentacles crawling all over my body, and I was terrified of catching them. I could hear those little white buggers slowly conspiring to jump on my hair. Nardika, the little girl I had helped on the first day in the village, and her teenage sisters wore their long hair in childlike plaits, but it didn’t hide the white specks that lived in them. I’d grown very close to those girls, who told me that before the tsunami, their father often went hungry while giving them his share of the food and they would sing songs to his tummy when it was growling