The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [63]
People warned us to stay out of these local problems or our work would be jeopardized. As it was, in every direction, villagers were begging me for money, so I found myself staying away from Peraliya altogether and working longer and longer hours in the peaceful sanctuary of the tsunami center.
In late August, New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina and it rocked the aid workers in Sri Lanka, especially the Americans. We felt hopeless being so far away, but we also felt that we had to finish what we had started. Many aid organizations pulled out of Sri Lanka to go help in New Orleans, but we couldn’t turn our backs on the villagers.
Oscar, his broken foot, and I loved our new house, which was surrounded by a beautiful garden. Since it was the monsoon season, we acquired it for a very cheap price, around the same rate as our old guesthouse at the beach. It had a ground floor where Oscar could sleep and also get out to the couch area to sit during the day. In the afternoons, monkeys swung in to eat the mangoes they had picked from the trees above us. We watched them dancing around the trees and coaxed them closer with bananas.
One day while I was working in a neighboring village, attending to a lady having a heart attack, Oscar kept calling on my cellphone demanding that I bring him food. He screamed at me through the phone while I balanced the poor lady on my arm. Then I nearly dropped her. I threw my phone on the ground in order to catch her with both arms and lay her on the ground. I attended to her for a few panicked hours and then finally made it home with some food from a local shop. By that time, Oscar was irate. He wouldn’t listen to a word about what I had been through. His curses struck the air around me like lightning striking an electrical tower. I felt numb.
Oscar was making me miserable but I couldn’t walk away from him like this. He was crippled in a strange land that I was responsible for bringing him to, and I was the only one there to care for him. When my husband had abandoned me after my accident many years before, I had sworn that I would never do the same thing to anyone else. So I pushed on in silence and tears as Oscar’s demands grew more outrageous, reaching deeper and deeper inside myself for strength.
Whenever I needed a time-out, I’d go to Doadandoa, my secret Sri Lankan island. I could walk out to it only at low tide, when the rushing water would swarm around my thighs. The journey was tricky to maneuver. The ocean floor had a jagged coral bottom with invisible holes in it that swallowed me when I lost my footing. But once I made it there, I was in paradise. I would stand on the large rocks to feel the ocean’s spray smacking me in the face. Friendly fisherman waved to me as they headed out to sea. On the island grew large coconut trees, and hundreds of black birds circled overhead.
It was this secret Sri Lankan island where I went to be alone with my thoughts. I listened to the silence, and it was loud. I listened to the birds and the wind and the ocean and the crickets and the boats and the fish and the rain. I listened to the grass growing and the ants walking and the butterflies eating and the shells breathing. I heard the sun singing and the sky laughing and I heard my creator as I listened to myself. The world is full of beautiful silences if we only listen. I lay under the swaying palms like a stranded mermaid waiting to be rescued, but nobody ever came.
When Oscar’s open wounds healed, I took