The Third Wave_ A Volunteer Story - Alison Thompson [71]
After we had inspected the construction efforts and met a few more people, our mission to visit the school was over. Major Shanaka advised that the roads were clear. It was time for us to get out while we still were able. We headed home safely to Hikkaduwa with our hearts full of joy. Back in civilization, we read about the attacks that had occurred the night before. Twelve Navy officers had been blown up in a bus near our guesthouse. We had made the right decision in staying put.
In the coming weeks, we continued our work and waited in frustration for the Italian government to start rebuilding the Peraliya School, but they were nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, Kym’s Free the Children foundation had already almost finished building the school at Ampara. They also gave us a small amount of money to pay for our continued living expenses in the Hikkaduwa region and return plane tickets to the United States. CTEC was growing and we had developed over eighty community points along the coast—villages where a group of people had taken responsibility for getting tsunami warnings out to their people. CTEC had given them cellphones, radios, and signboards.
With the programs and small businesses we’d put in place up and running, and the rebuilding we had accomplished, it felt like it was time, at last, for Oscar and me to leave for good. Separating myself from Sri Lanka would require a herculean effort, but I knew that I needed to get back to my life in New York.
In February of 2006, fourteen months after the tsunami tragedy, Oscar and I bade a more final farewell to the villagers, the chief, our translators, the CTEC officers, and Tsunami-dog. We returned to New York for good.
CHAPTER 13
Readjusting to life in New York City after over a year of barebones existence in the developing world proved more difficult than I had imagined. Volunteers wrote me emails saying that they didn’t fit back into their lives anymore, and I could empathize. But I told them that it was a good thing because it would mean more change for the world in the future. I urged them not to forget what they had learned in Sri Lanka. It was also time for me to begin sorting through the tsunami footage.
We had come home with more than three hundred videotapes of our tsunami experiences. When we had first arrived in Peraliya, we were working very hard, so I pulled out my little video camera for at most ten minutes a day. At first, nobody in the village had a problem with it. Somehow they knew the purpose was to bring further help to the area. It was only much later, when Sunil was shooting all over and for longer hours, that some villagers became suspicious that he was making money off them, although that was far from the truth. We had gone to Sri Lanka to volunteer for two weeks and we could not have known how long we would end up staying or how much footage we would end up shooting. All I did know was that I had a story to tell.
I decided that I wanted to create a documentary film that would encourage people to volunteer and help raise money for CTEC. It would be a road map to volunteering and the message would be that everyone is needed. The problem was that we had no money. Thankfully, our friends Richard Belfiore and Dave Pederson gave thirty minutes of footage to the Supersize Me documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock for viewing. He called us and said that he wanted to be part of the film. He started out by giving us money to live on while we completed it. Morgan was a sweet, genuine guy with a passion for the truth, and we felt very fortunate to have him on board.
Our friend Russ Terlecki found us two great editors, Cedar Daniels and Peter Demas. We edited the film