The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [62]
We took a van to a hospital in Galle to get an X ray of Oscar’s leg. Upon arriving there, I noticed a clothesline where washed latex gloves hung out to dry for reuse later. Not a good sign. Inside, we recognized many of the doctors and nurses who had come to help us at the Peraliya field hospital and they were very friendly to us. Oscar’s foot and leg had three fractures and he had open wounds going deep down to the bone, which would have to heal before the plaster could be put on his broken foot.
In Sri Lanka, there were always two prices for everything, from a visit to a national park, to hotel accommodations, to food in restaurants: Sri Lankan price and tourist price. We were used to paying the local price with our Sri Lankan friends in our village, but when we were alone on the road, we were always overcharged like tourists. The local hospital bill came to 220 rupees, equivalent to about twenty-two dollars U.S., and the officials should have charged us that price since they knew us and were familiar with our work in Peraliya. Instead they charged us the full tourist price, which added up to a few hundred dollars that we didn’t have.
A week before the accident, Oscar and I had moved from Hikkaduwa to a jungle house inland. We wanted to be in a quieter area away from the villagers who turned up at our guesthouse daily to beg for money. It was a classic Sri Lankan home and had a beautiful garden full of exotic fruits and flowers with a little Buddha shrine in the middle of it.
I brought Oscar back to the jungle house to recuperate after his accident. He wasn’t a happy patient, completely helpless and confined to a couch. He couldn’t get up on his own or even hop around, as it would pull on his stitches and they would start to bleed. Thankfully Sunil offered to help me out. The two of us would have to carry Oscar in his full weight to the toilet and to bed. When Sunil wasn’t around, I had to lift him on my own. He was an extremely heavy patient and it made my back ache. What’s more, I was now completely alone in the village. I was torn between three worlds: running the tsunami center, opening businesses, and racing back and forth to care for Oscar. I tried to keep him satisfied, but there was no consoling him, and his words to me now were always harsh and full of pain. I had been in war zones, famines, earthquakes, floods, and poverty-torn countries and had been charged by hippos and lions in Africa, but looking after Oscar turned out to be the most trying experience of all.
The village monk and a few young local boys would visit Oscar regularly. They’d sit around and play Karum, a local Sri Lankan board game in which players flick a round, flat disk across the board by placing their finger on it. Sunil and his girlfriend, Juliet, would also come over at night to play Karum with Oscar until very late. Our landlord, who lived in the house in front of us, was suspicious of anyone staying with us after midnight. He thought they were living there and cheating him by not paying the rent. The accusation was far from the truth. But one night when Juliet had lain down on the couch to rest, the landlord burst into the house and threw her and Sunil out. A fuming Oscar called the police, who took the landlord away for interrogations. We found another house to rent a quarter of a mile inland.
The villagers were trying to get back to their everyday lives, which also meant that gang activity was in full swing. Suddenly our village wasn’t the innocent place we had stumbled across after the tsunami. It was full of murderers, thieves, and very desperate people. The first murder of thirteen that we were to experience took place