The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [45]
Understanding what people were trying to say to us was our biggest problem as volunteers. There were three different types of translators: the ones who would translate to the best of their ability; the ones who would say they could speak English but when they didn’t understand, to cover their embarrassment, would make something up that was often not even close; and the ones who would just translate something completely different from what we were saying because they wanted to help their friends and family first. We did our best to pick up words and phrases in Sinhalese, and eventually I did learn quite a bit, but not speaking the language was the most frustrating problem of the entire trip.
Sunil and Chamilla, our two main translators, were chameleons. To this day, I’m still not quite sure who they are.
Sunil was a handsome, thin Sri Lankan man in his late forties. A Canadian citizen, he had flown in a week after the tsunami to record the destruction. We met when he came wandering through Peraliya with a video camera, shooting footage of the debris. I asked him if he would shoot the rebuilding process for us a few hours a day, as I was too busy working in the hospital to do it myself. I knew the footage would be useful for fund-raisers and was important to record for historical purposes. There was no talk of making a documentary at that early stage, as we were just too busy to even think that far ahead. But in the back of my mind, I knew that we had to keep documenting everything and would sort out what to do with the footage later.
Over time, Sunil became our friend. At night, he would eat with the volunteers and we would laugh about funny things that had happened that day. Sunil loved to go body collecting with me and we often bonded over new discoveries of bones we had found in far-off jungle areas.
Much to his dismay, I was often forced to use Sunil as a translator, which got him into all sorts of trouble. He would try to remain objective behind the camera when the villagers talked about their problems, but they saw him as one of their own and constantly surrounded him, begging for special assistance. When he did help, he found the villagers accusing him of false things, such as stealing money or being unfair, so he stopped getting involved and remained quietly behind his camera.
For many months now, we had been receiving frequent visits from a grieving lady who had lost her daughter on the train that had been swept away by the tsunami. She lived a few hours down the coast, but made the bus trek up to Peraliya daily to see if we had found any new bodies. She had visited every morgue in Sri Lanka, inspecting thousands of corpses, looking for her daughter. I had never come across such an inconsolable woman. I tried to explain to her, as I had done with many others, that her daughter was in a beautiful place and that her spirit was watching over the woman, but I simply couldn’t say it anymore. The reality was that her daughter’s body was probably stuck upside down in a tree somewhere rotting away. With that thought, I burst into tears, making matters worse.
Sunil and I agreed that we had to think of a way to help this lady put an end to her miserable roaming of the countryside. Weeks earlier, Sunil and I had come across a body similar to her daughter’s description in both height and dress, although we couldn’t say for sure that it was her.