The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [61]
One day at the Tsunami Juice Café, Chamilla brought me a large, frothing drink and served it up with a cat’s meow, as sweet and caring as could be. I took a sip, but the drink tasted disgusting so I poured it out on a plant when she wasn’t looking. Later, Chamilla’s brother told me that the drink she’d given me had something in it. He said that Chamilla felt my regular, if small, donations were a pathetic act on my part. She believed that I had thousands of dollars in the bank and was refusing to help her. Even so, in a sort of wishful, delusional way, I continued to defend and love her.
When Oscar and I first arrived in Peraliya, we were thrown into the responsibility of running an IDP camp for more than 3,000 people. That took priority in our lives. There was so much devastation and loss around us that it sucked all the love and energy out of me daily. My only quality time with Oscar would be a quick dinner before we passed out at night.
Oscar had also become more and more agitated lately. Relationships can be difficult enough to manage in your hometowns, but take someone you thought you knew thousands of miles away and add a billion more pressures, and you might meet an entirely new person. Oscar had started raising his voice and cursing at me in front of volunteers and villagers, which disturbed me deeply. I understood that he was more prone to outbursts than I was—he was from a Sicilian family that was accustomed to yelling. I had been raised in a quiet atmosphere where people raised their voices only if they were in danger. When I first visited Sicily, I had watched in shock as Oscar’s really sweet family argued around the dinner table. I pleaded with them to stop fighting. They looked at me in surprise. They weren’t fighting, they explained. This was just the way they communicated.
Nevertheless, Oscar and I enjoyed many beautiful moments in Sri Lanka, sharing brilliant sunsets and swimming with turtles at the beach. We took motocross bike rides into the jungles and led the weekly swimming days with the children. Oscar was passionately committed to our work in Peraliya, and this bonded us together. During our time there, a deeper friendship developed between us, one based on respect for what we were achieving each day. But while we had long discussions about how to improve the village, we never spoke about the tensions between us. Whenever we went far away from the village, he seemed to relax and the old, fun Oscar would return. But once we were within a twenty-mile radius of Peraliya, his negative emotions would swell again.
Now that we were the only two volunteers left in Peraliya village, we were spread especially thin, between running CTEC and the rebuilding activities. Oscar was operating at full speed, trying hard to right a hundred wrongs, but things weren’t right between us. We harbored a quiet anger toward each other. But then again, we understood that we only had each other.
One day in late August, I received an urgent phone call from Oscar saying that he had been hurt in a motorbike accident. He pleaded for me to come quickly, telling me that he was on the main street of Hikkaduwa. My heart throbbed like a jackhammer as I raced on my scooter to help him. My bike had a top speed of sixty miles per hour. I spoke to it like a racehorse, telling it to hurry up. I almost fell off a few times as I charged along the highway, overtaking everything in my way.
The Hikkaduwa main road was busy and long, so I raced right past Oscar without seeing him. When I couldn’t find him, I doubled back. I did this a few times before I finally spotted him outside a medical clinic getting help. I thanked God he was alive and rushed over to examine his hurt leg. He said that the bus had pushed