The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [39]
It was a miracle I never caught lice from any of the children, but something lived on my face for a while, an organism so small that it was undetectable by the human eye. In extreme heat, it would make my face itch unbearably all day long. I was determined to kill whatever it was. I scrubbed my face with alcohol, and after that failed, I tried a whole bunch of strange concoctions, including toothpaste and nail polish remover. (Warning: Do not try this at home.) The product that finally did the job was the lice-killing solution we had used on the children. I slathered it on like a face mask and let it soak in for ten minutes. It stung a little but I stuck with it, convinced that it was killing the little critters on my face. And indeed, after that I had no more itches. I must have caught it from kissing my Tsunami-dog. She had all sorts of crawly things living on her but was so cute that I couldn’t resist cuddling her anyway.
Donny would rise while it was still dark out to get a head start on the day before the hot sun melted the workers. He would arrive at Peraliya way too early, waking everyone up. He would walk around the village, checking on the rebuilding progress, then stop off in one of the homes for tea. There, he could speak with small groups of men about various village problems in a casual, friendly setting. Donny was an immensely valuable member of our team and also my dear friend.
Then one day, Donny unexpectedly collapsed to the ground. Some villagers rushed him into our field hospital. His leg shook in the most unusual manner, like he had a snake crawling around inside him, and he said the spasms were painful. Shouren, a young Scottish doctor, took over, because the situation was too complex for me to handle. Shouren injected Donny with painkillers, and he fell in and out of consciousness as we carried him on a stretcher into the back of a van to rush him to a faraway hospital.
Seeing Donny lying motionless in the back of the van like that stunned everyone. Donny loved to make great entrances, and here he was making an even more dramatic exit, as the village women wailed around the van. Dr. Stein, our resident German doctor, and Dr. Novil, our Sri Lankan angel, went with him to the hospital. Michelle, a volunteer from London, also accompanied him and cared for him in the hospital every day. She became Donny’s hero. The first hospital turned out to be quite unhygienic, so they continued on four hours north to the one decent hospital in Sri Lanka, in the capital city of Colombo.
The days passed quietly as we waited for word from Donny. Oscar drove up to visit him, and many of the villagers made the long bus trek up to the capital to see him as well. With one man down, I was unable to leave the village to visit. We felt his loss. We didn’t realize until he was gone that he had been doing the work of ten men.
With Donny in the hospital, Oscar gone to visit him, and Bruce tending to logistics in Galle, I endured quite a few days in Peraliya when the workload became overwhelming. People flooded into the hospital with all sorts of problems and I did my best to solve whatever they threw my way. I held six different conversations at one time while sitting at the large hospital desk full of strange items, from a wooden leg to hula hoops to deworming tablets. Sometimes twenty people would swarm around me at once while another sixty waited outside to have their say. The whole time I also had to keep an eye on running the hospital as cheeky kids ran in and out looking for cricket balls, and other villagers tried to sneak supplies.
Visitors from an American Southern Baptist church had stopped by to meet me when I received a call to retrieve sixteen bodies, so I just took the guests along with me. We continued our conversation as we collected corpses (which I now looked forward to doing because it gave me a chance to get some exercise). A local chopped down some