The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [41]
People openly shared their feelings around the hospital table. The general sentiment was that we were working our guts out and nobody in the village seemed to appreciate it—or at least that’s what we thought. When things are going well, people have a tendency to remain quiet, but when times are tough, people speak in hurricanes. All we had heard these past few weeks were complaints. Every day, villagers confronted us, accusing us of stealing the tsunami money, even though we had given them everything we owned, including our clothes and the last of our money.
It felt like we were running a small country and we just couldn’t please everyone. Women would lie to our faces that their children had received nothing, even though we had given them food, water, shelter, medical care, schooling, uniforms, books, and a dozen other small things. They would complain and complain, but then not propose any solutions. It discouraged us.
I speculated that the villagers were emerging from the grieving stage and realizing they didn’t have anything left. Depression was supplemented with anger, and the villagers increasingly showed signs of distrust toward one another and us. Arguments broke out outside the hospital daily, often resulting in stabbings. We had to sew up an extra five people a day due to knife fights. People would stab each other over a packet of cigarettes, not thinking about the long-term ramifications of their actions. Suicides were on the rise, too, as was drug use. Some days, we would find used medical needles sitting in open rubbish piles around the school area where the children played. We knew that the needles weren’t from the hospital, which routinely collected hazardous medical equipment in a sealed bucket and disposed of it in town.
Sometimes I would be alone in the hospital when drunken men would violently shake the window bars and threaten to blow the place up. I knew they could do it, too, because we had found hand grenades in the rubble in the early days, and a small child had even brought one in to a volunteer. Donny had searched extensively for dangerous explosives in an attempt to clear them all away, but more could turn up at any time.
As the volunteer meeting continued, we poured out our frustrations, and the possibility was raised of our pulling out entirely. Some volunteers thought that the people of Peraliya were too spoiled by us now and that we should go elsewhere on the coast, where the villagers needed more help.
Bruce, as always, was the voice of reason. He explained that most of the problems were coming from just a few troublemakers. We were not trying to change the villagers’ lives nor did we understand their culture, he said. We had to stay focused on the bigger picture, which was giving the villagers the basic infrastructure they needed to get back on track.
At the end of the day, we decided to call a meeting with all of Peraliya to iron out problems and ask the villagers if they wanted us to close the medical center and go home. Personally, I felt it was too soon for us to leave. I knew the medical center couldn’t last forever, but I also wanted to see the end of some very bad tsunami-related infections. The next day, we posted translated signs around the village asking everyone to attend. We expected about twenty people to show up, but within a few hours more than a hundred people were milling around. We placed a long table in front of the crowd and recruited an educated Sri Lankan scholar, who just happened to be passing through the village, to translate.
The talks lasted for five hours under a punishing sun. We focused primarily on solving problems, from thievery, to rebuilding, to distribution of goods and funds. At the end, we took a vote about the future of the medical center. The villagers were one hundred percent in favor of its remaining open. Meeting adjourned.
We were expecting a popular American clown doctor to visit Peraliya that afternoon. But after