Free The Third Wave by Alison Thompson Page B

the professional line and started working with us as volunteers or left money for us to buy food.
    We soon realized that we had to establish a management system for our relief efforts. On the first day, we had met the village chief and a number of other responsible men. Oscar and Bruce held regular meetings with them through our translator, Chamilla. Together, they formed committees for food distribution and other basic tasks, and chose organizers to be in charge of each one. They drew up long lists of the families in the village to make sure people didn’t double up on aid and that everyone was treated fairly. Each day, Oscar and Bruce would hold a meeting with heads of the various committees to discuss camp problems.
    Temporary shelters were popping up all over the village, but we were in a race to get people under some sort of roofing before the monsoons came flooding through in March. Bruce serendipitously acquired a large shipment of tents that an NGO had dumped somewhere farther up the coast. Oscar and his committees distributed these to families in the village.
    The housing situation improved again when a group from the Danish government called Danish People’s Aid came to town and pledged to pay for 700 temporary wooden shelters if we could help provide manpower to build them. Naturally, we said yes. The much-needed temporary shelters were ten feet wide by twelve feet long and often had to house fourteen family members. They were supposed to last only until permanent homescould be arranged. The committees gave temporary housing first to pregnant women and those who had been seriously injured; the rest was based on a lottery system. Even though the shelters had four walls, the villagers still had nothing to put inside. We took a photo of each family to hang on their wall as a new beginning.
    In late January, we moved into a new guesthouse that was a dollar a night cheaper, which meant a lot to us at that point. At night we would collapse in excited exhaustion and drink beers and king coconuts around a bonfire on the beach. There were more stars out than could ever be counted.
    The town of Hikkaduwa, where our guesthouse was located, was slowly reopening, in large part thanks to the help of the U.S. Marines who were on vacation from the Iraq war. We invited them to Peraliya and asked for satellite photos of the area to see how much damage had been done. The photos revealed that the village was now four feet below sea level, which meant that the area would continually flood. The Marines were in Sri Lanka to restore government facilities and hotels, so unfortunately they didn’t have permission to help us clear land. But they did boost our morale and play volleyball with the children in front of the hospital.
    Oscar, Donny, Bruce, and I were so overloaded with work that we usually wouldn’t even stop to eat during the day. The food in the village was spicy and strange-tasting anyway, and large bugs and other unrecognizable materials would fall into it. So we lived mostly on bananas and the local king coconuts, which were extremely large green and yellow coconuts with clear milk and without the strong coconut taste. Known to cure more than forty-eightdiseases, they also made an excellent moisturizer and hair conditioner.
    A few mom-and-pop food operations started opening up at the local guesthouses, and they would cook meals for the volunteers. The only problem was that if many hungry volunteers descended on one guesthouse at the same time, it could be hours before we ate. The guesthouse cooks would prepare only one meal at a time and present it to the person before going back inside to cook the next meal. By the time the fourteenth volunteer received his meal, it would be three hours later. I thought it was a very strange way to do things, but we learned to make it work for us by dropping off our dinner orders at least five hours before we planned on eating.
    On one particularly busy day at camp, hundreds of children