A year after the devastating earthquake in Turkey, the situation has hardly improved, according to Annet Sturre from Odoorn and Melissa Kazan and Ruben Sturre from Emmen. The couple from Emmen soon wants to celebrate their postponed wedding in Kazan’s native country. Because mother Annet does not want to arrive empty-handed, she has started an aid campaign.
Kazan had just married her beloved Ruben in the Netherlands, when she went to Turkey to make preparations for the wedding there. The night of February 6 changed her life and that of millions of other compatriots completely. “It was terrible,” Kazan reflects in the RTV Drenthe program Cassata. “Everything collapsed. We were very scared. We fled outside and jumped onto a roof.”
“We wanted to celebrate a nice big wedding there. They live near the sea, very beautiful there of course,” Ruben explains. But the earthquake turned the paradisiacal coastal region into a disaster area. A wedding party was the last thing on Melissa and Ruben’s minds.
But this year the couple from Emmen still wants to celebrate. “Life goes on and you have to go on too. So we just want to celebrate the wedding, with the family there, with friends from the Netherlands who are coming over.”
However, the situation on site is still dire, says Ruben’s mother Annet Sturre. “It’s very terrible. People are still living in tents and containers. And the weather has also been very bad, so there were a lot of floods, tents catching fire. There is a lack of everything: water, food, clothing.”