The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [69]
We planned New Year’s dinner on the beach and hired a local guesthouse to cook for us. It was a beautiful scene right out of the movie The Blue Lagoon, with a fire nearby and candles and ferns spread over the table. Donny was there with his seventeen-year-old daughter, whom he had brought back with him on this trip. He had proudly showed her around the village, sharing his adventures. Volunteers glowed with healthy tans. Some played their guitars around the fire. At midnight, the locals set off fireworks, which exploded in ribbons over the sea. We held one another in love and made toasts to 2006. I felt alive and beautiful and I wanted everyone in the world to feel that way. This was a happiness that no one could ever take away from me.
Over the next couple of weeks, many of the volunteers and NGOs left. Oscar and I were alone again. The tsunami recovery effort was going to take decades, but there weren’t many people left to help.
Oscar and I made plans in mid-January to drive up to the Ampara district to visit the new school being built with Kym’s fund-raising money. It would be a two-day journey into the Tamil-occupied war zone. Tori, our Muslim Tamil van driver from our first weeks in Sri Lanka, agreed to drive us. Oscar’s Italian friend Marco, who had flown in to film with us, also came along.
First, we stopped to visit President Mahinda in the capital. Oscar, Marco, and I waited at the president’s headquarters for many hours, but as we had arrived unannounced and many people were lined up to see him, we abandoned that mission. We left word that we were in town and booked a room at the Nippon hotel. Major Shanaka, the head of the president’s security forces, came to visit us there for a drink and we discussed the dangers of the journey ahead. He also made a call to a commando camp in the north where we could stay on the first part of our journey. We set off the next day.
We arrived at the camp at night and were immediately surrounded by military men with submachine guns. The commandos were quite hospitable. They gave us an officer’s house to stay in and the head of the camp, Major Janaka, joined us for dinner. I was thrilled to be there. I brought up the possibility of coming back to train with the commandos at a later date. He wholeheartedly agreed but I think he may have been humoring me, even though I was dead serious. The major marked our maps with alternative roads we could take, which the Army had cleared and therefore shouldn’t have land mines on them. I noted that he had said “shouldn’t have,” which didn’t sound very reassuring.
As we slept, we heard muffled explosions in far-off places. We rose early to get a start on the day, heading cautiously into the unknown. We passed fields of women working the crops and they waved to us as we drove by in our van. When we stopped to say hello, they giggled shyly and asked for lipstick. I handed over my MAC spice-colored lip liner to great bursts of joy, and they ran back into the fields. My newly acquired skill of speaking the Sinhalese language was of no use to me now; everyone here spoke Tamil. We drove past Hindu temples, Buddhist shrines, and Islamic mosques. In this region, I came across the most beautiful shade of green. I called it “paddy field green.” It was unlike any color I had seen before. I sat glued to the van window taking many blurred photos.
We passed through numerous checkpoints where military men nervously approached our van for inspection. They didn’t look happy. We guessed they had probably been sitting at these posts away from their families for years. I asked them if the roads were safe and they gave us small grins as if to say, “Are they ever?” We traveled all day along the tsunami-ravaged coastline where clearly no one had come to help. At one point, we came to a jagged one-lane road covered in four feet of water. We let a few cars pass us and then carefully drove through the rushing river by following the same route