Peraliya, 11 January 2005. A village that had lost 249 of its residents, a quarter or more of its population, and had 1643 more bodies from the Queen of the Sea train dumped on it by a watery Grim Reaper. When my fellow volunteers and I took an exit from the main Colombo-to-Galle road and entered the lives of those who’d survived, it was a village that had lost its main industry – fishing – just about every one of its buildings, and all its hope too. There were four of us who wanted to make a difference for a couple of weeks – somewhere, somehow. For Alison, Oscar, Bruce and me – all vastly different characters from different backgrounds – it became our ‘workplace’ and we couldn’t stay just for the planned two weeks. Instead, for five months it was where we went through every possible emotion – despair, frustration, anger, helplessness, sadness, love, laughter, exhaustion, introspection, satisfaction but most of all, pride at what we achieved.
I’ll never forget the sight that confronted us. Galle Road, the main thoroughfare from Colombo to Galle, looked like a street-sweeper had pushed the contents of a hundred rubbish tips to the sides of the bitumen. The train stood, a little mangled but largely intact, on the train tracks just metres from the edge of the road. In between I saw a child’s shoe; it broke my heart to think of what might have happened to its owner. From there we walked to a clearing in the middle of the small village; rubble and rubbish were piled up everywhere. No matter what direction I looked in, it was the same – an obliterated, flattened and tangled wasteland. How could anyone have survived this? It seemed as though ninety-nine per cent of a once thriving fishing village had been steamrolled. And those expressionless, helpless faces looked at us as though they weren’t capable of any emotion or even acknowledgment that we had arrived. As I said at the start of this book, they were zombies. They just sat, or stood, as if still in shock – and this was two and a half weeks after the tsunami had hit.
That was my initial sight. Then there was the sound, this pathetic wailing of women who had lost their families; some of them had seen their children washed from their clinging arms, taken by the monstrous wave or the wall of water that followed it and washed miles inland, never to be seen again.
The smell left the most overpowering impression. The putrid smell of decomposing flesh. That unmistakable odour is something which still haunts me today: the bloody rancid smell of death. I would never become used to that smell. It reached a point where I’d be gagging and dry-retching as I became more and more enveloped in this huge catastrophe. It was obvious we were in a place that had suffered immensely; it was written on the faces of the survivors. ‘These poor bastards,’ I thought. ‘I can’t begin to understand what they must have gone through.’
We walked into the village and asked the blank faces we met if anyone spoke English. We were fortunate that one of them, a young man in his early twenties called Chinthu, was a lieutenant in the Sri Lankan army, and spoke impeccable English. The rapport between us was instant after I established that I’d been in the Australian army. We asked him could we see the chief of the village and we were led to a grey-bearded man in his early sixties, I guessed, Aiyypyge Darmadasa. We said we had come of our own accord and asked him, through our newly appointed translator Chinthu, what we could do to help them; we were only a few but we’d come here to see what we could do. We said, ‘Look, we have some bags of rice and some medical supplies,’ and when the words ‘medical supplies’ got around the village, within half an hour the place was just swarming with people with cuts and bruises and injuries a whole lot worse.
The chief told us we were welcome. But where would we start? That question was answered quite easily in the finish: we started from the centre and worked our way out. The villagers were in no frame of mind to initiate a rebuilding of their town themselves; they were so obviously still grieving and most had lost all their possessions – house, vehicle, boat, clothing and self-respect as they were forced to live on the streets or under the carriages of the death-trap train. And they’d received virtually no outside help, or even interest. The millions of dollars that according to the news bulletins had flooded into the tsunami-affected countries certainly hadn’t made their way to Peraliya, nor many other parts along the Galle Road, as we were to find out in the ensuing weeks. Even the Sri Lankan government had done little, other than have a work gang bulldoze a mass grave to get the bodies out of sight and away from the busy road.
Trucks, tuk-tuks and the odd car just drove straight past. Those who stopped did so to take a photo of the train, or to pray for loved ones lost when the train was hit by the two massive waves. The train became a macabre worship site. Visitors saw people starving and traumatised but did nothing. As I’ve said, that irked me so much in those first few days. I thought, ‘Fuck me, they pause over the train and not one of ‘em offers any help. Are they blind to the serious need of these people?’ How many people had died after the tsunami before we got there while others just passed by? How could people just visit and not offer any help? It still astounds me all these years later.
There was no fresh water in the village, and that was a major issue. There appeared to be little food, too, so we cooked rice and exhausted all our supplies in one day feeding hundreds and hundreds, thinking we would buy more the next day. Bruce, who was used to cooking the best organic food for the rich and famous, never had such a ‘clientele’ or as basic a menu. There were no toilets so people were doing their business anywhere on the streets or in the rubble, which caused a further health hazard. Most of the inhabitants sat on the ground in the day and slept on the same dirt at night because they had no homes.
We walked around the place as Chinthu explained what had happened, and it was easy to work out what needed doing first. People had injuries that needed urgent attention: broken limbs that required splints of some sort, wounds that needed stitching or cuts and grazes that needed disinfecting to avoid serious infection. We had to start somewhere so we put up a temporary shelter off our van – actually, it was my old army hootchie (a small waterproof tarpaulin to sleep under) – and we had a mobile first-aid station. All we could do was patch them up. We didn’t have any drugs; Panadol was the strongest thing we had then, but it was better than the local remedies they were getting. A lot of the injured had just been patched up by applying their native treatments which they were used to using as part of the traditional Indian medicine called Ayurveda. So I called what we did ‘second aid’, actually. I don’t know how many hundreds lined up in the next few hours. The injuries here were just as horrific as previous places we had visited on the way down the coast. A major goal was to stop infection so the supply of antiseptic went pretty quickly. We had kids who had been bitten by starving or frightened dogs, and babies with roaring temperatures caused by we didn’t know what. We were not doctors, but we had to act like we were. And people would often come up to us without having anything really wrong with them – they just wanted us to touch them and let them know that things would be alright. After some of them had been treated they would get down on the ground and kiss our feet, so appreciative were they.
After several hours of providing first-aid it was decided that the school library should be cleaned out and used for accommodation and a field hospital. All that remained was the library and one two-storey classroom building. The high water mark could be seen a few tiles above the bottom of the library’s roof line – I’d guess about four metres high. Debris from the school and other buildings had been washed inside, joining toppled school desks and the children’s schoolwork, while papers and books were trapped in the grilles of the high vents. Crikey, if it had been a school day when the tsunami hit … well, I can’t begin to imagine. I took some bizarre relief in the knowledge that this disaster could have been so much worse, if that was at all possible.
Once we cleared out the rubble inside the library, as many homeless people as could fit would sleep in it and in the remaining school building. They had no water, so their mouths were dry and children and adults gulped down the smallest amount from our bottles and licked their lips like they’d had the best champagne. So much good emanated from that library over the ensuing months, as thousands of people saw it as the base of our operations.
Somehow we had to get the people working, during the day at least, to make them constructive in rebuilding their village and to divert them from their grief. Night-time was such a different story. I remember the sobs of the mothers and fathers and kids … it sounded like the whole village was crying sometimes. It was heartbreaking and depressing; something that I’d never had to deal with before. I just had to leave the village at the end of the day; it was completely overwhelming, people throwing themselves about in fits, flailing arms and legs thrashing madly about.
The only person other than Chinthu who could speak good English was a woman called Chamilla and those two soon became our ‘disciples’, if you like. There was nowhere for us to stay in Peraliya so we headed to a little tourist town called Hikkaduwa, four kilometres further down the road towards Galle. We came upon the Casa Lanka guesthouse which had thirteen rooms costing $5 a night. It was closer to backpacker accommodation than a luxury resort – rooms had fans but no air-conditioning and there was no swimming pool, just an open-air bar and restaurant. In our eyes, though, it was a five-star retreat compared to the place we’d just left.
Hikkaduwa, which was not as badly smashed by the tsunami as Peraliya because it was protected by the reef, was initially a fishing village, like Peraliya, but in the 1960s it started promoting tourism, and its surf is quite famous and popular for surfboard riders from all over the world. I think there are probably a dozen hotels and guesthouses there, the biggest one being the 156-room Coral Gardens Hotel, but you could hardly call it a resort town. It was a beautiful setting, though, overlooking the ocean with lovely white sand and palm trees. Casa Lanka had been knocked around by the tsunami a bit but upstairs was fairly unscathed. The family that owned the guesthouse was really grateful for having us there, because our payment helped them get back on their feet as well; tourists were rare for quite some time after the tsunami.
I roomed at first with our driver, Toyna, and found him to be a level-headed, down-to-earth devoted Muslim. In those first few weeks he taught me to be more humble, less cantankerous and more patient. He and Bruce were the soothing influences on me of an evening as we de-stressed – always reiterating messages like ‘have faith, things will work out’, ‘don’t rush’, ‘little by little’ and ‘don’t lose hope, the people need you’ as I went about my business like a bull at a gate.
It was at Casa Lanka of an evening, when we would finally ease down and have a meal and a few drinks, where I got to know better my other three colleagues – Bruce French, Alison Thompson and Oscar Gubernati. The verandah and downstairs ‘beer garden’ area became our debriefing ‘surgery’ of a night where we would let go of all our feelings and describe our day. Someone amongst us would pick up the camera and record our confessionals and these were later turned into an integral part of The Third Wave documentary.
Bruce, Alison and Oscar were all very different people, drawn together by the same compassionate view on life.
Bruce was certainly an interesting character. He lived in a yurt in the mountains outside of Telluride, a ski resort town in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado 3000 metres high in the San Juan Range. He usually worked six months a year for touring bands as they travelled around the world; he had served meals to not only the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Pearl Jam but also to Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, Rush and a few others. He specialised in meals for people with special dietary demands and had worked on luxury yachts too, as well as for people in his home town. He loved surfing as well as skiing and was just one of those laidback guys – I described him as being ‘zen’ – who had a massive heart of gold and a clear head, a guy who just loved making mankind feel at peace. Bruce had stopped off in Galle in the early 1990s when he was on the crew of a boat in an around-the-world sailboat race, and during his three-week stopover he rented an old motorbike, which broke down too many times but which also gave him an opportunity to immerse himself in Sinhalese culture. When he saw what had happened in the tsunami, he knew Sri Lanka had the fewest resources to cope with a disaster of such magnitude, and hopped on a plane to help.
Alison, from southern Sydney in Australia, was the daughter of a church minister father and a mother who was a nurse, so she had an interesting upbringing which included spending some time in Third World countries with her parents on their missionary trips. She had wanted to play women’s cricket for Australia and was apparently pretty good at it, but she had a car accident shortly before the Aussie team was to be picked one year and she couldn’t walk properly for a couple of years. She became a mathematics teacher but loved travelling and had seen plenty of the world, including Antarctica. She moved to New York when she was in her late twenties, worked on Wall Street for a while and attended film school at New York University. After she saw reports of the devastation from the attack on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, Alison rollerbladed down to the World Trade Center and decided to volunteer to help administer first-aid. She spent nine months volunteering in her spare time at Ground Zero. She was very compassionate, a real busy-beaver personality who threw herself right into whatever she focused on, and I got the feeling she experienced a lot more emotion than she showed, but felt she had to keep things inside so she could keep going and never lose sight of the big picture; plus she reckoned she had an Italian boyfriend whose Sicilian temper at times ensured he was abusive and emotional enough for the both of them (Alison’s words not mine, Oscar, buddy)!
Oscar was a high-spirited Italian who had grown up in Palermo, the capital of Sicily. He moved to Los Angeles in 1990 to undertake film studies at UCLA and went into a production company based at Universal Studios where he started producing independent films. He moved to New York in 2002 to establish a production company called Ozone Pictures, and it was through the film industry that he met Alison. While Oscar and Alison were passionate about the film industry, I do believe their major motive for going to Sri Lanka was to do what they could to make a difference in the clean-up, and that was obvious in the endless exhausting hours they spent helping others. Filming their efforts allowed them to take the incredible story to the big screen to motivate others to help people in need. Oscar was the business mind, the manager figure, during our time in Peraliya. We butted heads a few times because we were the strongest willed and most outspoken of the four of us. We didn’t hold back our feelings, but I love him like I do Alison and Bruce, as you would anyone you spent so much time with in such circumstances. As a foursome, we just gelled, proving that opposites can work in a group, complementing and inspiring each other, especially when we had such a strong shared motivation driving us.
After our first night at our new home in Hikkaduwa, Toyna took us back to Peraliya. He was our private chauffeur for the first few weeks before we moved into separate hotels and hired tuk-tuks to go back to Peraliya each morning; they virtually became our private taxi drivers and our regular business helped feed a few more families. On our second day in Peraliya there were still blank faces although a few smiles were starting to come forth, especially from the children. It became very much about us winning the hearts and minds and assuring the people that we were there to help them and they shouldn’t be afraid of us. I think our energy rubbed off on them.
I picked up bricks from the ground and started to clean up a little bit, and then other people started to follow. I think they thought, ‘Well, if this white man, a stranger, can do it, I can too.’ They just needed some firm guidance. A lot of the volunteers who filtered through Peraliya in the coming weeks would say, ‘Geez, you’re a bit hard on these people at times, Donny. You’re pretty noisy and boisterous.’ Well I think, quite frankly, that’s what they needed. They needed my energy to sort of get them out of that place they were in, really; they needed a stern but caring voice. I’d like to think my ‘no nonsense’ type of leadership I’d learned in the army came in handy in motivating people.
It must have been so demoralising for them to see the occasional supply truck or earth-moving equipment and the like drive past their village while they sat there as the forgotten tribe of Sri Lanka. And those that did detour were mostly there just to worship the train or take photos. Not that there were many trucks because, for all the efforts of the NGOs (non-government organisations) that were getting worldwide credit from the media, and all the government-backed aid that was supposed to have been dispersed, very little saw any part of the 100 kilometres or so of coast between Colombo and Galle for quite a few months. When the NGOs did come our way, I believe that some just wanted to fly the biggest flag in front of the biggest area and were, in some ways, competing against each other as opposed to helping each other – not that I am bagging the motives of NGOs, because some in particular were to be godsends for Peraliya.
The four of us soon took on ‘special task’ assignments and unofficial titles. Alison was in charge of first-aid and she made a bandana with a red cross on it, out of a scarf, I think, so she could be easily identified as a ‘nurse’ – although she revealed later it was also to shield her from the lice on many of the unfortunate people she treated. Oscar became the main negotiator and coordinated the allocation of funds and the volunteer help that began to flood into the village within the next few weeks. Bruce took care of logistics, like the storage of food and other supplies, and the cooking, and had almost a full-time job keeping me sane! I became head of construction, if you like, arranging for temporary and permanent housing and getting sanitary and water services built. To look the part, the chief gave me an orange workman’s vest, like you see roadside workers or construction signalmen wear. We sort of became a modern-day Village People, as far as looks went anyway.
We decided on day two that we had to clean out the temple so that the people could pray; that was obviously integral to their healing process, so that became a primary task for the next couple of days. But the main thing was to somehow feed the people so there wouldn’t be more deaths. To this end, one day early on Oscar and I stopped a truck which was on the way to Galle and acted like aid officers, instructing it to unload its wares. It seemed too easy; I’d stand there with my orange vest, walkie-talkie and big stick which made me look ‘official’ to a degree, and Oscar spoke to them and indicated where they should go and unload. Sometime in that first week he also commandeered an earth-mover bound for somewhere else. When you think of it, we could have been jailed and charged for obstructing aid services or something, but the people of Peraliya were desperate for food and we had to find some way of delivering it. Then I met this lovely gentleman from a town inland and told him what a problem lack of water was. He came back the next day with a truckload of fresh bottled water.
We had to build a trench of some sort for people to crap in; sanitation was a big problem. By day two we had acquired some shovels and I assigned Luke and Steve (the two pilots who we met on the way down from Colombo and who’d stayed to help) to co-opt a few local men to dig a slit-trench about 3 metres by 1.5 metres deep. It wasn’t rocket science, just a hole in the ground bordered by a screen of shade cloth the two of them had picked up along the way, but it was a big breakthrough just the same. It was Peraliya’s first post-tsunami public toilet! That first building project also occupied some of the men who otherwise could find nothing to do. I thought, ‘If we can keep these people busy during the day, it will take their minds off this terrible, terrible stuff that’s happened to them.’ So from that second day, for eight to ten hours a day, we’d try to keep them as busy as possible and for the other fourteen to sixteen hours they could grieve or whatever they wanted.
The children posed a different challenge. Many had lost their parents and had been taken under the wing of relatives or friends. Some had no one to care for them, so they stayed together in a group. The children no longer had the daily routine of going to school because the school was out of action and most of the teachers had died. They had no toys, not much shelter in the stinking heat which reached thirty-five degrees Celsius just about every day, and they were too scared to go swimming in the ocean. So we’d play with the kids when we had a chance, and chase them; anything to maybe put a smile on their faces for just a few moments. The smiles of the children produced the energy that kept us going, and if it wasn’t for those children, we might have walked away a few weeks later as jealousy, inter-village rivalry and the feeling of desperation sank in to many people who realised they had nothing.
In those first few days we forged some trusting relationships with a core of people who became our deputies. We certainly had to get the chief onside, so as basic timber and nails and tools came in, I made sure his was the first temporary shelter we built. We never made any major decision without his approval; that’s how the culture of those small villages worked. We’d have a meeting every morning with the chief and the elders and decide a schedule of activity. Oscar would always say if he called a meeting for 7.30 am we might start by 9.30; the concept of time is not something the Sri Lankans have much regard for, as we learned. We had to have some sort of list of priority tasks, and high on it was the building of temporary homes – there were only about ten families out of 550 whose houses were left standing.
It’s weird that it took a few days for it to completely hit home to me that it was the train I had seen on the TV news bulletins standing there as a constant backdrop to the village, and that it was where more than 1600 people had met their deaths, plus over 250 from the village, many of whom we uncovered scattered under rubble and inland over the next three months. It hit me like a ton of bricks one day when I was looking at it and it became more than an abandoned train but evidence of just how many lives were lost in Peraliya. As I’ve said, when there was this endless parade of people stopping off to examine it, we thought, ‘Stuff it, we’re not going to let them come here and turn a blind eye to the devastation of the people who survived,’ so we organised for the children to have collection buckets for donations. We had them line up to form a ‘guard of honour’, and we collected a reasonable amount of money which went into purchasing food and building materials.
When Steve and Luke left we were down to four people with a mountainous task that intimidated us, but we had become so dedicated to helping these people there was no way we were going to walk away. Bit by bit, brick by brick, was all we could do to help. My days would start at 5.30 am and often I wouldn’t get back to Casa Lanka until eight or nine at night. Day by day the people of Peraliya gained trust in us. I’d walk around the village early every morning and say ‘G’day’ to nearly everybody – it was important for them to know that we were still there and hadn’t abandoned them, that somebody cared about them.
About a week after we arrived we had a visit from the Sri Lankan Minister for Trade and Commerce, Mr Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, who stated that this part of the country was indisputably the worst affected, far more so than the eastern provinces he had just come from on a tour of inspection. He became a great ally from that day on, and he delivered on his promise to get us some army staff, and even police, who were stationed at the edge of the village to help us keep things in order. We had bulldozers and engineers and building materials which made the restoration of the village so much easier to achieve. In him we had a high-ranking government official we could call when we needed some resources. He seemed a very sympathetic man and it was clear he was seen as a pretty important dude by the villagers, so it gave them new hope when he walked around the place. He was very inquisitive about why I, and the others, had come to Peraliya and I didn’t know how to explain it other than saying it was ‘some sort of calling’.
It was quite bizarre, though understandable when you think about it, but the people of the village thought we belonged to one of the big aid organisations; that we were part of an organised group assigned to help them. After seeing us talking at length with Mr Fernandopulle and also signalling trucks full of supplies to a halt, that was probably logical. It was about three weeks into our stay, when four or five other volunteers who had heard about our plight joined our little project, and Bruce said to me: ‘Donny, these people don’t realise that we aren’t from, you know, a proper organised relief group.’ We’d never pretended we were anything but a small group of individuals, so in a way it was a compliment that they thought we were organised, experienced aid workers.
That had its positive and negative sides. The positive was that we could make our own decisions and not be held back by red tape and approval systems; the negative was that the villagers thought we had access to the millions of dollars of funding and all the labour services that they had heard about. It took a lot of convincing them that that wasn’t the case and some people would never be convinced that we didn’t have a bottomless pit of money, especially after we distributed what private contributions we received to some individual families (more of that later). We were just four people who had little money and relied on donations from friends and contacts in our home countries and from those passing by. We put up a sign that said ‘Relief Camp Peralya’ which looked far from professional, especially when it was spelt incorrectly (the ‘i’ was hastily added). It acted as a magnet for people travelling on the Galle Road to stop and have a look at our ‘project’, and it attracted some donations and volunteer labour. It was ironical, too, that while the villagers of Peraliya were angry at the government and the largest aid organisations, believing they had turned their backs on them and not directed any of the perceived pot of gold their way, other villages along the coastline were jealous that so much was done at Peraliya, and thought that it must have received favoured treatment from officials. That just wasn’t the case.
Peraliya was struggling to come to grips with the tsunami’s devastation, like any village along the coast. The thing I found toughest to come to grips with personally, was the dead remains. I had to brace myself when I came across bodies in the rubble and I had to adopt the mindset that there was nothing I could do for them, other than maybe take them to where they might be identified and have a proper burial. But confronting dead bodies brought the two fatal car crashes in Perth back to my mind, especially at night when I tried to sleep. Then two incidents happened while I was in Sri Lanka that added to my mental misery and were the toughest experiences to take. As much as I would like to forget both, I can’t shake them from my memory.
Once a week, after the children had become comfortable getting back into the ocean (and that took some doing), we would take them to Hikkaduwa for a swim and to buy them ice cream; well, mostly Alison and Oscar and some helpers would. Other times we’d make sure we took some time out to play with them or take them for a walk along the beach; it was as much a relief for us from the exhausting work in the unbearable heat as it was a treat for the kids. But one of those walks turned into a nightmare. It’s in the film. I don’t know who was with me carrying the camera, I think Toyna. Anyway, we came across a body washed up on the beach. When I stopped, I realised it was a boy and he had no head, his arms had been cut off at the shoulders and his legs had been severed below the knees. And he was still attached to a wooden stake by rope. That didn’t happen in the tsunami.
One of the children said, ‘Let’s pick it up by the legs,’ before we stepped in to take them away from the body as soon as possible. Unusually, there was no odour whatsoever coming from the corpse. We quickly buried the body before someone else came across it. I was very traumatised; I still get flashbacks. Had that poor body been tortured? Who knows with the ongoing troubles between the Tamils and Sinhalese, and even the brutality of the inter-village gang rivalry we later learned about. How could a young boy be so cruelly mutilated? Sadly, it wasn’t the only body I saw washed up on the shore; there were plenty of others, and some had something missing from their torsos – a hand or an arm or something. I never got used to it; I just learned to deal with it. I know it sounds harsh but there was nothing I could do for them, so in a way, that was a closed book. It was the people who died well after the tsunami hit, people I knew and became so fond of, that caused me more grief.
The incident that affected me even more was when a young man in a tuk-tuk was hit by one of the crazy trucks that used to race each other from town to town. It happened probably fifty metres from a hospital on the outskirts of Galle. You would think someone from the hospital would have come out to help, but no – no one lifted a finger except for Seb (that’s Dr Sebastian Pluese from Germany) and me. I was screaming for help and for someone to get this or that but nobody could speak English, so nobody understood what I was saying. We gave the guy CPR and I opened his mouth to get some air into his lungs but his jaw was just all split and his teeth were hanging out. I thought, ‘Fuck, man, there’s no way I can give him a breath of air.’ Seb told me to use my hands to make a funnel and just sort of blow that way, but there was nothing we could do for this poor guy.
Finally someone came from the hospital and put him on a trolley and wheeled him into their version of the emergency department, but still no one seemed interested in helping, even when we shouted to them to come to our assistance. We learned later that apparently medical people in Sri Lanka are reluctant to help accident victims (and there would be hundreds of them every day) for fear of legal action against them if treatment is not successful; I don’t know if that is true or not. Finally we got someone to put the defibrillator on him – it was the first time I’d ever seen the ‘paddles’ used – but he was too far gone by then. He died in a pool of blood in front of us.
The terrible pity of it, I later learned, was that he’d just picked up a new tuk-tuk and had been riding down to the hardware store to get some timber to build himself a little shelter for it off the side of his house. Sebastian and I went to the family, spoke to his mother and ended up giving her 20,000 rupees so they could have a proper burial. There might have been a little bit left over to help the family through, as the dead man had been the main breadwinner.
That haunted me for a long time – the third young person in my life dying in front of me in a motor accident. But as soon as I got back to Peraliya I sought some counselling from an Israeli psychologist who had been working in the village with the Israeli aid team, and that helped me enormously, but it still affects me today – how could it not? That sad episode, however, bonded Sebastian and me even more closely together. He said to me one night that I was the best unqualified ‘paramedic’ that he had seen, which was a wonderful thing to say and boosted my confidence no end.
Back in Peraliya, the more rubble we cleaned up, the more bodies we kept coming across. We didn’t see many at first but once the army engineers came in and we had bulldozers at work, we came across a lot more. We were still discovering bodies well into April, except by then they weren’t bodies, they were just bones. We would try to find somebody who might recognise them by a piece of jewellery or clothing. My able lieutenant Kumara had lost his wife, his two daughters and his sister, and every time someone found a body, whether it was around Peraliya or inland, he would be the first one there to see if it was one of his. It was heart-wrenching to see this young man, who I dealt with every day, so dejected when a body wasn’t one of his family’s. He just wanted to find some remnant of them, or to know where they were found. He never did, and that saddens me so much.
There was no morgue, and I didn’t want to know too much about what happened to the bodies before they were buried; Alison took care of that. Sometimes she would put limbs in ladies’ handbags or garbage bags because we couldn’t keep up the supply of body bags. People would walk up to her sometimes with an arm or hand or other body part and give them to her like they were children’s toys that needed putting away. She said at the time: ‘I try not to think about the bodies; sometimes I pretend I am at the butcher’s and am picking up meat. It helps me with the reality of what I am really holding in my hands. Whatever it takes to get through this, right? The bodies I find are unrecognisable and full of flies and maggots.’ Some bodies had the hands chopped off them by thieves wanting their jewellery; other times body parts had been chewed by famished dogs. It is something that still disturbs me and I never, ever got used to seeing or even hearing about it. It was fucking horrid.
The mass grave we had there was once exhumed by an organisation – Interpol, I think – in an effort to find the remains of a couple of foreigners, which they did. Even when we only found a few limbs, if they could be identified we still put them in coffins and they had a proper burial. It was horrific at times; you’d be working somewhere and then all of a sudden you’d find somebody’s hip, their femur, tibia or fibula, or a foot. You wouldn’t smell it until it was on the surface; it was like cracking an egg open, a rotten egg – phew, it just hit you.
Dogs started to bring body parts back to the village from wet areas a few kilometres away and the risk of disease was a great concern, especially as the dogs would be licking the children, and quite a few dogs began getting sick. So we had to order body bags from wherever we could get them – the Sri Lankan government for starters – and go and bag as many corpses as we could find lying in shallow water or buried in mud as the water level subsided.
About a month into our stay there were days when we had to get an expedition together and go inland to recover bodies. Alison had become known as the ‘Body Collector’ by then – somehow she had steeled herself for the almost daily occurrence of being presented with part of, or all of, a dead person.
Sometimes we would recover twenty bodies or body parts a day. We would never let her go out searching for corpses without one of us – Bruce, Oscar or myself – with her. This was hard work, physically and emotionally, but we had to deal with it and think, ‘The least I can do for these people is to give them a decent burial and maybe give their relatives some closure if they can identify them.’ I’d often wear a face mask when on body collecting duties; I just couldn’t stand that smell of death. I remember one lady was identified by the dress she was wearing; it was recovered only 150 metres from the remains of her house and her son insisted she be buried on the house block. It seemed there was a constant flow of funerals for months.
Quite a few people committed suicide while I was there. One man I got to know well hanged himself. And I can’t judge them – how would you recover from your spouse and children being taken from you? Then there was a man in the village with no legs who starved to death, like he just lost his will to live. We made a special trip to Colombo to get him a wheelchair but, after seeing what happened to his family and friends in the tsunami and not being able to help at all because of his handicap, he just withered away. That was tough to take. There were others who died in different circumstances, too, but I don’t want to release the memories anymore than I have to here; many cases I have locked away.
The thing that drove us to keep going the most, no matter how tough it got, were the children. So many had lost their parents, or their entire family, and some had wandered in from other villages and towns when word got around that we had food and medical supplies, and they would attach themselves to the main group of kids and stay. In the end we sent them to an orphanage that we helped rebuild in Galle.
Someone must have donated a heap of clothes early in the piece because the kids always seemed to have nice new clothes on. But in the first week or two, it didn’t hide their gloomy personalities. They’d lost their family members, their homes, their possessions, their school, their love of the ocean, because of what it had so cruelly done to them and their daily routine. Plus the village leaders, who would normally have assured them that everything would be okay in their lives, had become so traumatised and demotivated by what had happened, the children had lost that security as well.
Alison suggested we get the kids to draw and act out their feelings on paper; for the first few weeks all they drew were large waves and bodies, people standing on houses, bodies floating in water, some without heads, and crumbled buildings. Then after a while they started to draw pictures of us and the new houses we’d built. That showed how their thoughts had changed, that they had progressed in dealing with the trauma of the tsunami, and that the healing was under way. They’d identify me by my slouch hat, stick and orange vest and Alison by the red cross. The children are definitely what kept us going when we were exhausted and often frustrated by the demands of the adults, who seemed to want more the more we did for them.
I think it was Oscar and a journalist from Britain, James, who came up with the idea of a system of photo identification tags for the children. There were reports of child kidnappings along the coast. I never came across any direct evidence of that, but other people certainly heard first-hand what was supposedly going on. Alison learned of two French nurses who saw a girl being taken away from an orphanage by two people who showed fake papers to suggest they had government approval to ‘adopt’ the girl, or maybe that they were her parents. They were allowed to take her away screaming. I’m sure a lot of the places hit by the tsunami, where so many kids were left homeless and orphaned, became prime targets for pedophiles. James and his friend Paola worked hard to ensure all the children in the village had ID tags hanging around their necks to protect them, and we thought the aid workers may as well have them, too, so people knew who we were.
You couldn’t help but be inspired and uplifted by the pure innocence and energy of the children and the fact that they – once they learned to again – would smile, and laugh, and play, and follow you and want to touch you and make you feel special – when they had absolutely nothing left in the wake of the tsunami.
We needed them. After a few weeks you could see the physical change in us. We all looked so drawn and exhausted. I would get to work before the sun came up and work until after dark and would only have fruit for breakfast, some rice and dhal most days (sometimes we wouldn’t eat during the day) and then a basic rice meal of a night to give us sustenance, although Bruce could make most things taste good. We couldn’t keep enough water in our bodies because it was very hot all the time. I developed ‘drop foot’ – a condition where you turn your foot inwards and toes downwards when walking, so rather than heel-toe, heel-toe, it is toe-heel, toe-heel – and had a lower back problem and bad knees, so I was walking along and often falling over. But there was no way any of us was quitting. Help, at times from the most unexpected sources, was soon on the way. Peraliya became a mecca for so many kind-hearted people from all walks of life who, like us, wanted to make a difference to these unfortunate Sri Lankans, no matter how small that was. It was bloody amazing when you think of it: the place the world had forgotten became a magnet for people from all over the world.