For the first two weeks in Peraliya we didn’t see one NGO, government or aid organisation grant of money and we were piecing together the village and its residents’ lives on handouts. But, like a gift from heaven, suddenly we were not alone. Aid groups started coming and providing people and materials. Peraliya, it seemed, was on the map of disaster hotspots. You little ripper! A major reason was that Alison, through the help of some friends back in New York, I think, created a website (you can still go to it: www.peraliya.com) and started recording a daily diary, initially from an internet café in Hikkaduwa and eventually from a computer at Casa Lanka. She appealed for help in Peraliya, pushing it as a place where people didn’t have to have specialist skills or go through the screening process that the NGOs insisted on before you could join them as aid-workers. As she said on the website: Volunteers Just Come!! Everyone is welcome: no skills required!!!! See you here!!
Bugger me, the advertising worked. By week three of our ‘project’ we had six or so more volunteers and a steady stream of people then came through Peraliya over the next four months; some stayed on longer than I did! Other than the website, there was strong word of mouth between people who knew, or knew of, someone who had passed through, and the little village sort of became famous as a place where there was no red tape, no strict approval process, no judgment of character, no need for any particular skill – just a human bank of souls with a compassionate heart and a willingness to dig in and give it a go. Of course the fact that it was the site of the world’s worst ever train disaster also drew people to it.
People then started wandering into the village, both individual helpers like us and organised aid-workers, and they’d ask, ‘Who’s in charge?’ Volunteers would point to the library or directly to Bruce, Alison, Oscar or me if we were in sight and say, ‘They’re in charge.’ We weren’t in charge, really; everything we did was with the approval of the chief and his village leaders. It was funny that highly trained, organised teams would come in and we’d give them directions, when in comparison we were the unskilled labour. But most people identified us as the project managers. The officers in charge would say, ‘What do you want my men to do through the day?’ – it was like I was the commanding officer. If only my old army buddies could have seen me.
We certainly didn’t do everything right by the disaster handbook but we were in there having a go and we were able to succeed because we were not caught up in all the bullshit red tape, bureaucracy and the political crap others probably had to deal with. If we needed to dig a hole, we dug a hole. If we needed to give somebody Panadol, we gave them Panadol. We used common sense and the need for assistance as our guide book. Scottish medicos Dr Shouren and his wife taught me how to suture wounds. Their motto was ‘see one, do one, show one’ – in other words, see it done, do it yourself, then show someone else how to do it. So there we were, acting as doctors and closing up bad wounds. It’s just like sewing up a bag of spuds.
Very early on, bottles of Coca-Cola arrived by the hundreds (directly from the local Coke distributors, I’d imagine) which was not just a real treat (for the kids particularly), but was good in settling some upset stomachs – even though the drinks were never refrigerated. Then USAID funded a heap of Sri Lankan volunteers, and hundreds came to earn money removing rubble and working as building labourers, but that also gave us more mouths to feed – and more casualties to treat, too, as they never wore shoes or any protection for their hands, so there were plenty of cuts and bruises. What we didn’t take into account was all the domestic animals – mostly dogs and cats – that were starving, too, and were forced to go into contaminated areas to search for food, which, as I’ve said, increased the chance of disease spreading. Alison sort of adopted a couple of cats only for one of them to be stolen and presumably cooked and eaten by some starving family. That shows how desperate people were.
When Mr Fernandopulle got some army staff to lend us a hand with the removal of rubble and building of temporary shelters, and young Sri Lankan army engineers came and helped with construction and clearing, they were extremely valuable because they had equipment like chainsaws – not the most efficient ones, but at least ones that worked. They were great guys, highly motivated, and their commanding officer was a tremendous person; we built up a very good working rapport and he would often ask me for input. Mr Fernandopulle certainly showed his devotion to Peraliya by sending in teams and resources within days of his visit. To be honest, I loved working with them and it was interesting to see how another country’s army operated. We even had US Marines come to help for a few days but, for some bureaucratic reason, they were not allowed to enter the village. So we pushed the rubble to the other side of the road where they were able to pick it up and truck it away, which was a massive help.
A senior German paramedic, Reinhold Klosterman from Hamelyn, came through one day on a reconnaissance visit to see which were the worst affected areas and how resources could best be allocated. He flew back to Germany and said he would return in a week with a full set of paramedics; we didn’t know whether it was wishful thinking or not but, bugger me, not only did he bring half a dozen others, he brought a heap of medical supplies as well – real cutting-edge stuff. They were just amazing, those guys, dead-set lifesavers, literally. Suddenly we didn’t have to stretch well beyond our medical capabilities in treating some of the more serious injuries. The medical supplies enabled us to have a genuinely well-equipped medical centre with fridges. Even a tablecloth was a big thing to have, as was shade cloth on the windows to cool the room down. These improvements, though, brought even more people from other towns or villages that didn’t have access to any basic medical service. Some would spend just about all the money they had to hire a tuk-tuk to take them to Peraliya for treatment then take them back home again. Some women walked ten kilometres to get treatment, that’s how desperate they were.
The extra resources freed me up from assisting Alison with the first-aid to concentrate on other important things, such as the tasks I referred to as the three Rs – ‘Reclaim, Recycle and Rebuild’. We connected water and electricity to newly built houses, mostly using Sri Lankan plumbers, electricians and tilers. We’d always try to organise labour from within the village if possible, but if not, from outside. Dinesh, who I often talk about, was an electrician from another village, Dodanduwa; he was the only Sri Lankan tradesman who came to Peraliya and asked what he could do without expecting to receive any payment. He got a lot of work from me, and I insisted I paid him but never at overinflated prices; he still had to do the job at the right price. I felt good that he and his family were well looked after because of his initiative and work ethic. Dodanduwa lost quite a few boats but did not have many damaged buildings; we managed to send some workers to help build huts so the the fishermen could repair their boats and nets under cover.
The Danish People’s Aid (DPA), which is a completely volunteer-run organisation from Denmark, was absolutely fantastic in sending over first-aid supplies, plus workers and food. The DPA provided building supplies for over 700 temporary shelters in and around Peraliya. It also had lots of women counsellors to help out with the Sri Lankan women. There were German, Austrian and Danish water experts who were able to get large water tanks in and connect them up to homes and other buildings, and repair the wells that had been destroyed or contaminated during the tsunami. The German organisation Technisches Hilfswerk (THW), a specialist natural disaster relief program, was fantastic, in that regard.
The Israeli aid team force brought about ten trauma therapists and psychologists into the village and they were a massive help. They started counselling those who had lost family members and took over entertaining and occupying the kids each day. They had them singing and laughing, and you can see them in a poignant scene in the documentary where, with Oscar helping them, they are doing crazy mime and dance movements. Oscar was certainly wonderful with the kids. The children were regularly laughing and by now had a lot more life in them, and that lifted the spirits of all the volunteers and the residents.
As I’ve said, it was very hard to get the children to go back into the water, though, because they were so afraid of it after the tsunami. Little by little we coaxed them in a bit deeper, taking a group down and linking arms so they knew they would be safe. At first some pointed to the horizon and screamed out, ‘Big wave,’ and ran back to the sand. Eventually they would go down by themselves and run around and splash, and the Israelis were wonderful in monitoring this and encouraging the kids.
We had a Texan minister, a fantastic guy called Larry Buck from Bread for a Hungry World, and he provided money for replacement boats and other goods. He also gave us ‘original four’ a personal donation to help us fund our accommodation and food, which was so welcome as we had little money and were relying on funds being sent to us from home. I got a job with the Danish People’s Aid as the temporary shelter construction supervisor, getting 1500 rupees a day (about A$19), which was enough to pay for food, washing and refreshments. I was able to afford to go ‘upmarket’ with my accommodation to an air-conditioned room in a hotel that had a pool and provided beautiful tropical fruit for breakfast. Between Larry and the DPA, that was the only funding I received outside of help from home, and it was enough to keep me going with my little luxuries.
Even Australian cricketer Shane Warne and the other great spinner in world cricket, Muttiah Muralitharan, dropped in for a couple of hours on a goodwill tour along the Colombo–Galle coast in early February. I met them and had a bit of a chat and they were great, playing with the children and lifting the spirits of the locals. Muralitharan comes from the city of Kandy and is one of the few Tamils to have played Test cricket for Sri Lanka, while Warney rated the cricket ground at Galle, where he’d played Tests against Sri Lanka, as one of his favourite grounds in the world – no doubt because he took his 500th Test wicket there the previous March (a few wickets ahead of ‘Murali’). The Galle ground was completely wiped out in the tsunami and Test cricket wasn’t played there again until December 2007. Word got around quickly among the volunteers that Warne’s charity organisation, the Shane Warne Foundation, donated a large sum of money towards the relief efforts; I heard $1 million, although that was never confirmed. Oh, and English cricket legend Ian Botham dropped into Peraliya too during a tour of tsunami-affected areas.
The kind-heartedness wasn’t restricted to people who came from overseas. It might have seemed a small thing to others but I was overwhelmed one day when I had to make a rushed trip to a dentist at Ambalangoda to treat a really bad toothache. He drilled and filled the tooth and I was over the moon with relief from the pain. I asked how much I owed him and he wouldn’t let me pay; he said in his broken English something like: ‘You come to help my people, the least I can do is help you in your hour of need.’ Just that little gesture meant something to me. While on that subject, a team of dentists came to the coastal strip but they were only equipped to remove teeth, not having brought any amalgam to fill them. They knew that fillings could not be maintained after they left so it was an attitude of ‘lift them or leave them’.
I also had my local ‘deputies’ who worked as tirelessly as any of the overseas volunteers or army personnel assigned to help us. Chinthu became my right-hand man and Dinesh became my left-hand man, with Kumara remaining a very able ally. Then there was Chamilla, the woman translator and one of the few Christians in the village – well, maybe the only one, I think, in a Buddhist region. She was a very kind-hearted woman. She told Alison she had prayed every night for God to send someone to help, and that ‘someone’ was us. She became an integral part of our team as well, a lovely woman, but ultimately she paid the price for her association with us when some turned against her, believing she was getting handouts the other villagers weren’t, although that certainly wasn’t the case. For months Chamilla, her husband and her daughter lived in the library turned medical centre, along with others, and didn’t complain that many families were given shelters before she was. She and her husband kept it immaculately clean, while she was on call virtually 24/7 if we needed a translator. Mostly she was used at the medical centre itself so that the many Sri Lankans who came for treatment could communicate what was wrong with them.
Chinthu, who I had a great rapport with from day one because of our army connection, was given extended leave from the Sri Lankan services to help his village. He was a very confident young man of twenty who was well respected in the village and proved to be very loyal to us; he was someone you could assign a task to and he would handle it and follow it through well. He was lucky that he’d lost none of his family members in the tsunami, so he didn’t have to bear the grief that Kumara did, for example. Chinthu used to love trying to copy my Aussie accent, and sayings like ‘that’s the go’ became second nature to him as an expression of encouragement. His accent was crap though (sorry, buddy).
Kumara, a sniper in the army and a very fit and athletic young man, was a more complex person who was badly haunted by what happened in the tsunami. He was out at sea fishing when it hit, so far out it was nothing but a largish wave that went past his boat. When he got to shore he quickly realised the devastation that had been dealt his people – and that his wife, two daughters and a sister had perished. His father was an alcoholic and was of no comfort to him (I learned little about his mother). Kumara carried a lot of anger and grief, and while he was a hard worker and eager to please as we did our grinding work, he struggled emotionally every single day.
Dinesh was a wonderful young bloke, and while we paid him market rates for his services, he went well above and beyond the call of duty, as did Chinthu and Kumara. Dinesh was the softly spoken, unassuming one – the opposite of Kumara – but he always liked to find the humour in a situation or crack a joke to lighten the mood. He came from a beautiful family in which he was the major breadwinner, and he was just so committed to what he did. Dinesh taught me the wonderful joy of family and what really mattered in this life, and how to stay centred and in touch with everything around me.
Unfortunately he suffered a terrible trauma while we were there and we organised for him to have some counselling, so worried were we about its effect. What happened was this: we needed a 44-gallon drum to be cut in half so we could use it to burn rubbish and also as a grille for a barbecue, so I asked Dinesh if he knew someone who could do the job. He suggested a young friend of his who volunteered to prepare the drum in his village. Dinesh’s friend took to the task with an oxy-torch, but unfortunately didn’t realise you’re supposed to fill a petrol drum with water first to neutralise the fumes. Once he hit it with the oxy-torch it blew up instantly and killed him. That really rocked Dinesh, who felt responsible; I did too because I was the one who had asked for the task to be completed and just assumed the kid had done it before and knew what he was doing. It was yet another tragic tale which still brings tears to my eyes all these years later.
Toyna, of course, was another one of our Sri Lankan inner circle, along with Sunil, who worked virtually full-time as the cameraman for Alison and Oscar, as they filmed hour upon hour of our work for their documentary. Toyna stayed in Peraliya with us for the first couple of months or so, although he went back to Colombo on a few occasions – once for Ramadan, I remember – but he sent a friend down to take over his duties. Toyna also went beyond his paid role to help us; the spirit of those people who were assigned as our helpers was just fantastic.
Peraliya became the place where volunteers could come and know that they would be welcomed and utilised, if not in Peraliya itself then in other villages like Seenigama and Telwatta up and down the coast. We also farmed people off to Galle where we renovated the orphanage, after a message had leaked through to us that it had become overburdened with tsunami orphans and help was needed restoring it.
Unfortunately, that led to an extraordinary drama that still leaves me a little traumatised. I went down there once or twice a week for close to two months to check on progress and help supervise after allocating some of our volunteers to restoration work. We were really proud of what we did there; Wal, a New Zealand carpenter, and Greg, an American volunteer, did some great work and we had murals painted on the walls and we repainted the place inside and out. We even used to send volunteers down there to lift the spirits of the kids and to entertain them. But one downside of people lobbing up in a Third World country and offering help is that there is no vetting of their bona fides and you tend to take people at face value. It wasn’t until a few weeks after I’d returned home that I received an email telling me the guy running the orphanage for those couple of months, an American I had always found a bit of a wanker actually, was a convicted pedophile, drug runner and fraudster.
This guy was there with his girlfriend and was using an alias. Apparently he’d only been released from a Mexican jail a few months earlier after being convicted of drug offences. He conned his way into taking over the orphanage in Sri Lanka but he was only there two months before shooting through suddenly when the Sri Lankan Criminal Investigation Department wanted to question him after concerns were raised about his involvement and possible fraud. It sounds like he saw the tsunami as a way of making a quick buck. There were rumours that he took off with a fair amount of money that had been donated and he might have interfered with some children while there too; and there we were doing every thing we could to help him! Even the singer Sting donated money to the orphanage. I don’t know whether the authorities ever caught up with him, but I doubt it. He may very well still be on the run somewhere.
We heard a lot of reports about corruption and people supposedly taking personal advantage of aid funds, so that cast suspicion over everyone – even all of the well-meaning of us in Peraliya. That was hard to cop at times but, hey, it was just part of the situation we were in – and I reckon a lot of foul business did go on.
One of the unpopular and controversial decisions made while we were in Sri Lanka was the government’s directive that anyone who’d lost a home within 100 metres of the shoreline could not rebuild back on their plot, supposedly to ensure their safety if a tsunami or massive tide or major storm or flooding happened again. Many of these people were evacuated to Alluthawalla, about fifteen kilometres inland. Well over a thousand people were dumped into the jungle with nothing but a small pond to wash themselves in and tents that were provided as shelter. It must have been so heartbreaking for them; here were people whose lifeblood was fishing and they were miles inland without a fish or wave within cooee.
When we found out about their fate from some of the villagers, I thought I should make it a priority to help build some infrastructure, because after they were dumped there the government pretty well forgot them. The locals were very sceptical of the government’s intentions; there were rumours going around that officials had disposed of the people within the 100-metre zone so the government could build resorts there in prime positions. I don’t know if there was a speck of truth in it but time will certainly tell. The strange thing was why they evacuated and relocated those only within 100 metres of the ocean. The tsunami went way inland, and whether you were 100 metres or 500 metres away didn’t make much difference. The tsunami had affected people three or four kilometres inland.
So I ended up spending a lot of time up there putting some sort of infrastructure in place to make it a little more habitable for the evacuees. I got some toilets built, and got a water bore dug for a well. We arranged to buy some pushbikes (and I think a few were donated) for some of them to be able to get back to Peraliya to see the ocean and friends. Alluthawalla was a picturesque setting if you were a tea, coffee or coconut farmer, but not if you were a fisherman. And these people were nothing but fishermen! They came from several coastal towns and villages and there were obvious inter-village rivalries and mistrust up there which caused some problems, as you would expect. They were getting food and water from aid organisations – I know the Israelis brought in cooking utensils and food. Some of the Sri Lankans brought livestock and seafood with them, and it would always be shared around as a communal thing. I guess they elected a chief of this newly created village, and some sort of hierarchical structure would have been put in place but, essentially, it was a refugee camp.
One of my best memories of Peraliya was the day the school reopened. It’s another event captured brilliantly in The Third Wave. It was very emotional. First, Dibika, a woman from Hikkaduwa, who had been saving to go on an overseas holiday, used her money instead to provide white dresses and white shirts and blue shorts for all the children as school uniforms. She also raised money to get some books and shoes. What an amazing gesture; she was a special lady. The glow on the faces of the kids when they had these pristine-clean new uniforms made me cry; honestly, I was sobbing like a baby.
I was worse the day the school actually reopened. We had cleaned up the old desks with wire brushes, got them repaired and painted and put back into the school rooms. We painted the walls and put the blackboards back in place. We had a bit of a ceremony and I thought I was going to faint; my legs went rubbery and I just went into a corner and sobbed to myself. It was so nice to see the looks on the kids’ faces and for them to get at least part of their school back; the lift it gave them to have their uniforms and classes back and a purpose and place to go to each day, a real sense of normality again, was just so obvious. It made me feel it was all worth it, that we had done something really good. I felt proud to be Australian, to be me. There must have been 150 to 200 children in the village. All of a sudden their eyes were wider and their smiles were bigger.
Then came the monsoons – the wet season – in February. We’d put a lot of temporary shelters where it previously hadn’t flooded from rain but the tsunami had changed the terrain, and suddenly people were living up to their knees in water. On top of this a tide spilled over the Galle Road and the railway line into the village. All hands on deck, we tried to put in place temporary breakwaters to stop the flooding, but it was just band-aid treatment. Water gushed through many areas and just sat there. It was so demoralising, for us as well as the villagers. Diverting the water from these new low-lying spots, already water-logged from the monsoon, was just too hard. Till now, coping with monsoon floodwaters had been second nature to the locals, but with the lie of the land different because of the damage the tsunami had done, nothing was certain. People who had felt blessed to have a temporary shelter or the luxury of a new brick home suddenly had half a metre of water through their houses, so for a few days they had to go back to sleeping outside or in the temple, library or school.
We lost about four or five shelters out of the more than 400 we had built along the coastline, so that wasn’t bad. However, we had a large mop-up job on our hands, which was made harder by the fact that the earth-moving equipment we’d previously been able to get from the army and other sources had gone; I think we got one backhoe. We sandbagged everywhere we could and hand-dug channels to take the water away from homes and the road, often in pouring rain. We couldn’t even get a truck full of rubble to build some break-walls; it was just so hard with the resources we had, but we managed to stop a lot of the tide from getting to the most vulnerable parts of the village.
Disease was the biggest danger – cholera and dengue fever – especially for the children and the elderly. Dengue can spread even quicker than malaria and can have just as serious an effect, including death. That was another of our successes. I thought there would have been a much bigger problem with mosquitoes. At one stage I suggested getting a fogging machine full of insect spray to ward off the mozzies but we never needed that. It is amazing that we did not have any outbreak of disease the whole time we were there – again, the big fella upstairs must have been on our side.
We restored so much goodwill and peace to the village in those first few weeks, it was easy to overlook that this was a politically unstable part of the world. The population of Sri Lanka is mostly Buddhist Sinhalese while the largely Muslim Tamils are an Indian-origin ethnic group that spread into northeastern Sri Lanka. Christians make up about eighteen per cent of the country’s population. Since the 1980s the Tamils have been demanding their own independent state. When we were in Peraliya there had been a ceasefire since 2002 (this lasted until 2006) but naturally a lot of suspicion and unease still prevailed.
One day it was decided that, as we had more volunteers than we needed, we would send a group of people further down the coast where there had been little assistance offered, past Galle and then up to Batticaloa on the east coast, and I was assigned to go with the group on a three-day trip. Now, Batticaloa was regarded as a Tamil Tigers (the rebellion army) stronghold and it has a history of mysterious disappearances of strangers and mass murders and massacres. Nine of us went in two cars: Toyna and another young man drove our German doctor Sebastian, two Danish surfers (and builders) Jen and Jen (I assume it is the Danish version of John), Chinthu and two local monks, one from Peraliya and one from Save the Children America, another organisation that helped us. Although we were told to be careful because it could be a pretty hairy place to go, we heard they desperately needed some aid just like everywhere else, so we took some medical supplies and toys for children.
Along the way we were bailed up at a roadblock by a couple of cadres, young Tamil women armed with AK47s. Shit, it was scary – they could have shot us and no one would have known what happened. Toyna was translating for us and we explained what we were there for, that Sebastian was a doctor and I was first-aid trained, and the monks had gifts for the children. They had their rifles pointing at us but once they realised we just wanted to help their people and they’d checked us out, the guns went down and all the tension went. We ended up treating some of their people and they were grateful just like anybody else at the end of the day.
The conflict between the Sinhalese and the Tamils was not our business. As far as we were concerned they were all Sri Lankans, and if they needed help, we would attempt to give it to them. We were not alone. Unbelievably, over 200 volunteers from twenty-three countries came to Peraliya and helped in some way during the five months of our ‘project’ – it really gives you faith in the human spirit. They came from Australia, the US, Italy, England, Ireland, Germany, France, Scotland, Denmark, Sri Lanka, The Netherlands, Israel, Jamaica, Lichtenstein, New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Austria, Singapore, Bavaria, Wales and Switzerland, and probably some other places, too, as I’m sure there were a few volunteers that didn’t register. The library became a landmark, a beacon of hope. Sri Lankans knew if they came to Peraliya and that building, the white people would look after them.
As I said, it was exhausting, especially in heat and humidity that I’d never experienced before, and it was often emotional. But I felt good about myself for the first time in ten years. I felt good because of the way the kids looked, and because of the vibe I was getting off the locals who had taken me into their hearts and treated me as one of their own. I felt I had contributed to something that was far greater than anything I’d done in my life, or likely to do in my life. Naively, I threw the antidepressant tablets away shortly after the school reopened because I was feeling so strong in spirit. It was a stupid thing to do but I just felt so positive in my life and that I no longer had anything to be depressed about; I didn’t need those dreaded things anymore.
My moods started to fluctuate within two days and I began to feel more anxious. People were telling me they noticed a difference in me, that I wasn’t coping like I seemed to have been before. So I went back on the pills. Maybe the damage had been done, though, coming on top of physical exhaustion, the adaptation to a different diet, my crook knees getting sorer and weaker, and the mental exhaustion I was suffering. I hit the wall so powerfully and painfully, I thought I was going to die – that old Donny’s number was up and the man upstairs had decided I had done my godly duties and it was time to join him.