The Third Wave (22 page)

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 they had chosen. We realized that these large holes must have been created by exploding land mines.

After crossing many more military checkpoints, we finally arrived in the Ampara district in the late afternoon, just as we had finished listening to Pink Floyd’s entire collection. There weren’t many bicycles and there were noticeably fewer cars; everyone got around on foot. We were eager to find somewhere to stay before dark, so we drove to the beach area, which was the tourist part of town. It was deserted. Many of the hotels were boarded up due to tsunami damage.

We stopped at a small guesthouse that looked functional, and Oscar and Marco walked around to find the owner while I raced over to the beach to play with some stray dogs. To our relief, the place was operational. The owner brought us drinks as we lay in hammocks watching the sun melt into the sea. He led us to tiny rooms that had hole-riddled mosquito nets and dirty sheets covering the beds. In the back, there was a tiny shower where a few drops of cold water leaked out and cockroaches crawled around the walls.

It was tranquil and eerily quiet as we walked along the beachfront looking for signs of life and somewhere to eat. We found only one place open, where a small group of local men were playing cards. We were the only foreigners around. The meal was slow in coming, so I walked over to the beach to look at the boats. While I was there, I befriended a dog who followed me along the
shore. He moved closer to me, letting out a peculiar bark I hadn’t heard from a dog before. The strange howling grew louder and the dog moved even closer. I forgot all about my “dog whisperer” gifts and became scared. I screamed out for Oscar and the dog leaped at me, knocking me down. It wasn’t friendly play; this dog wanted to mate with me and had become excited by my touch. He wanted to show me his dominance. He started nipping at my legs, and just then Oscar came to my rescue. He pulled the dog off me and frightened him away. I was thoroughly shaken.

We arrived back at our guesthouse to an urgent text from Major Shanaka, with whom we had just met in Colombo, telling us there was going to be a terrorist attack somewhere in our area tonight. He was very concerned for our safety. He wanted to send the military in to help get us out. We didn’t even consider his offer. If we had learned one thing about this war, it was that the military were the biggest targets of all, and we were safer being away from them. The Tamil Tigers didn’t target foreigners. Major Shanaka then sent a flurry of anxious texts warning us that we should leave the area at once.

We glanced around the hotel and down the coast. There was no one in sight; we were all alone. I wondered if others had known about the attacks as well and had fled to their homes. We debated leaving, but by now it was after 10 p.m. and we knew there could be land mines on the roads, so we decided to remain until first light. We were all too aware that land mines didn’t discriminate between military men and tourists. I felt a rush of excitement as we discussed our plans. I changed into my cargo pants, grabbed a flashlight and emergency gear, and lay down to sleep with one eye open.

At first light, we packed the car and headed an hour north to find the new school. It was a tense ride. Oscar yelled at me for
wearing flip-flops rather than hiking boots, wondering how I was going to run away if confronted by danger. He was right, but the nervous way he snapped at me made me cringe. I was over his bossy attitude. Along the drive, we passed through dirty, poverty-stricken towns and spied commandos walking through the jungle checking the trees. It was obvious they weren’t looking for mangoes.

Finally, we made it to the area where they had started building the new school. Oscar held my hand and we took a deep breath, letting out months of struggle and hard work with losing the rights to build the new school at Peraliya. It had been challenging, but our sadness turned to hope as we quickly realized that the new school was meant to be here. We walked through the grounds and tearfully watched a miracle growing around us. In the schoolyard, we met some children and their parents. Tori, our Tamil driver, translated for us as we told them about Kym Anthony, the banker from Canada who had raised the money to build their new school. They were very happy about it. A little girl sang a thank-you song to Kym into the video camera.

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.

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 in a small underground office in Chinatown, where everything cost less. We lived cheaply on fried dumplings that cost two dollars for five and tasted divine. The neighborhood was full of illegal activities, and we’d see daily raids by undercover detectives cracking down on gambling and prostitution rings. In the summer, they screened old black-and-white Chinese Marxist propaganda films in the park.

During the editing process, we relived every moment of our experience. It was like watching a backward roller-coaster ride built with twists and turns that triggered fiery flames. It made us yearn to be back with our Sri Lankan children. When they appeared on the computer screen, I would touch it and smile. The biggest shock, however, came when the tapes were translated. We had no idea what the villagers had been saying at the time. Now we found out that while some of it was beautiful, other parts were unbelievably malicious.

After slaving away fourteen hours a day for a year, interspersed with a few short trips back to Sri Lanka in between, the documentary was finally complete. We called it
The Third Wave
, the nickname for all the volunteers and aid workers who came to help after the first two tsunami waves had destroyed the village.

The film opened in April 2007 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York to standing ovations and five sold-out screenings. We had finished it only a few days before the festival, so we hadn’t had any time to get excited about the big night. Hearing those first and second standing ovations, which went on for over fifteen minutes, was embarrassing and shocking to me. I felt humbled, remembering my suffering tsunami friends. I hoped that many people would see the film, bringing in more aid and volunteers.

The film toured the world after that, with screenings in Sydney, Tokyo, Iran, Monaco, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles, the United Nations, and all over Asia and the United States. Every time Oscar and I appeared, the question-and-answer sessions went on for hours, and we were thrilled to find people genuinely intrigued about what really went on over there and how they could get involved in volunteering.

In January 2008, while I was on a trip to Hawaii to visit the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, I received a call from an unknown number. A male voice said he was Sean Penn, the actor, and that he had just watched
The Third Wave
. He loved our film and wanted to help spread the message of volunteerism. I looked into the phone when I realized that it really was Sean Penn’s voice on the line. After recovering from my state of shock, I listened to what he had to say. He was going to be president of the Cannes Film Festival that year and asked if he could take our documentary
there to show to the world. I told him that sounded like a bloody great plan and rushed upstairs to tell Oscar, who was in bed with walking pneumonia. When I entered his hotel room, by coincidence Oscar was watching the Sean Penn movie
I Am Sam
on television. I said, “Let me tell you about this bloody great plan.…”