The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [57]
On that first day back, we had to stop our meeting twice when false tsunami scares sent villagers fleeing into the jungle. At first I thought these were drills the officers had organized to show me their skills, but in fact they were real tsunami scares. The CTEC officers dutifully checked their computers, then made their rounds through the villages, reassuring everyone that it had been a false alarm and that they could stay in their homes. Watching the team in action made me so proud. I thanked Dr. Novil and the officers for their hard work. Later that week, Telstra donated ten new cellphones to our cause.
Word about CTEC was spreading all over Sri Lanka. The police, the Navy, and other members of the military would stop by regularly to check on false tsunami reports. Shortly after the Nicobar earthquake, CTEC received letters from the United Nations officially endorsing the center and one from the minister of social services thanking them on behalf of the Sri Lankan government.
These were strange times in Sri Lanka, ones that made us shake our heads in confusion. So many amazing things were happening, but there were also so many deceptive schemes at work. I was learning that the aid business was a dirty one. I saw how the NGOs and villagers were each trying to take advantage of the other. One of our doctors summed it up especially well: He said that it was more honorable to be an arms dealer than to be in the aid business. The arms dealer says, “I have a gun, do you want to buy it?” He has no hidden agenda. Aid groups, on the other hand, would sometimes misuse and redirect funds in ways that made my blood boil, all in the name of helping people.
The corruption hadn’t started with this latest tsunami; it had been going on for decades. But it was magnified by the disaster. I saw villagers begging for new boats, and then turning around and selling them for cash as soon as the aid group had left. Then, a month later, they would beg the next aid group to buy them a boat. Some families received six boats and four houses in that way. Aid groups usually stayed for only two to three weeks before a new team came in to take their place. The new people wouldn’t know the villagers and would innocently go forward to help them. As a result, the cunning were getting richer while the honest folks were still waiting for aid. The ones who spoke English received more aid than those who spoke only Sinhalese. Our job was to weed through the lies to find the truths, but it was becoming harder every day.
On the other side of the fence, the NGOs were highly accountable to their donors. In a rush to fulfill that need, some took photos of projects that weren’t their own, including ours. I visited websites where NGOs declared that they had rebuilt 2,000 homes when in reality none had been started. One group even had the nerve to post a photo of our hospital on their website. You can imagine my shock when I found it. While NGOs got mired in swamps of paperwork, people truly suffered and millions of tsunami aid dollars sat around in bank accounts and got redirected to other causes. That, in my mind, was the worst crime of all. Of course, there were also some NGOs doing great work, as well as many smaller volunteer groups that offered tremendous help.
CHAPTER 11
For the past thirty years, the Sri Lankan government had been involved in an ugly civil war against the Tamil Tiger rebels. When the tsunami hit, some of the worst damage was in the northern region of the country, which was the stronghold of the Tamil Army. Thankfully, this brought about a cease-fire in order to get aid into the region. But the peace rapidly dissolved into mistrust, and as the months passed, suicide bombings and attacks were on the rise again.
Oscar had returned to training his soccer team, which gave him the idea of holding a soccer match against a Tamil team in Jaffna, on the front lines