The place is peaceful, one could almost say quiet. The leaves of some cypresses and pines whistle in the icy breeze that sings to the place, while a few birds accompany the melody. To the sides, falling from the branches, some melting snow slips through the trees and falls towards the ground.
There, on earth, hundreds receive it, rest. Some of them have been lying here for years, decades even. Others, a very majority minority, for just a few days. “This Friday is the first day that this is quiet. The first since Monday. Thursday, all the previous days… everything was full, entire families, many people. Everything overflowing,” says Hussein, a resident of the town of Sekeroba, in the Turkish province of Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of the earthquake last Monday morning.
Around the man, a cemetery whose size exceeds all expectations: the old headstones and graves are almost equal in number by the new ones, hastily built during the last hours. The land, the materials, the names of the deceased give it away: there has not been time to explain who lies here, who rests below because others are arriving. Sekeroba, a town of 11,000 inhabitants, has lost more than 800 of them in a week.
“Families, as they can, bring their deceased to the cemetery and they bury them themselves. There is no service for it. A few days ago a prosecutor came to town. He wrote down the names of the deceased who told him and left. He is already. Tonight, for example, there has been two burials. In one of them there were three deceased. They were a mother and her two children, who were found dead and embraced. Their bodies were attached, there was a very strong smell,” explains Hussein.
Cities and towns
in the southeast of Turkey, everything has been uneven. The total number of deaths, between Turkey and Syria, now amounts to 22,300, but each affected region has received a different punishment; a sentence reduced or increased according to the orography and the tectonic plates that cross the place. But in the same area, the treatment has also been different: the teams of rescue -Turkish and international- have arrived at the place, but they have focused, above all, on the delivery of help and rescue tasks in the cities, where there are, of course, more people trapped under the ruins and in need on top of them.
The villages, also affected, have been almost abandoned. There, help has hardly arrived. “We have received water, food, some medicines… all this came just a couple of days ago,” says Aziz, a resident of the village on the Sekeroba side of Beyoglu, also in Kahramanmaras province. Help has come in the form of food, but we have not received enough stores and this is a problem. We do not have electricity, or sanitary and hygiene products enough. Going to the bathroom is being a problem, and if this continues like this we could get sick.”
Help, says Aziz, although late, has arrived, thank God. But the rescue teams never did. “I myself took out two people [de los escombros]. Their building had fallen on them, and we managed to get them out after they died. I didn’t get anyone out alive, but other neighbors did manage to do it. Here and in other towns… everyone had to do it with their own resources”, says Aziz, and of course, he understands, that there is so much damage, so many dead, that it is impossible to reach everything, but equally one cannot understand what it is to remove a dead neighbor from some rubble, in his town, in his house, his neighbor.
“I don’t know what else to say… I just hope that no one else has to go through what we’ve been through in this town,” Aziz says.
Shops, shops, shops
Sekeroba, five days after the earthquake, has become a ruin mountain, roofs on the ground, living rooms and dining rooms thrown into the street, chickens and cows among the rubble and, above all, shops and bonfires surrounding all the destruction.
But they are few, its inhabitants assure, very few have arrived, and many more are needed to be able to shelter everyone. Most of them, five days later, are still sleeping outdoors: “Please, please! Tell your superiors. We are really grateful to them, and we need this food, but really, what we need most are tents.” , there aren’t enough, there isn’t enough for everyone”, a woman asks a volunteer who, with his truck, has brought buns and pastries to the town.
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In the distance, Halil, a local farmer and family man, watches the scene. The man was lucky: his home, although it has become unusable, it is still standing, although if you look at it with some force the walls could give way. On the Monday after the earthquake, Halil and his wife were able to go back inside, arm themselves with plastics, fabrics, ropes: create your own tent. Since then, they sleep there.
“Luckily we are fine now. With our chickens and the help we receive we have everything we need to endure these days, says Halil. But that night… In that house in the back, the one that was destroyed, we made holes from the ceiling, that’s how we tried, that’s how we knew how. A child… a mother… the father too… we took them all out dead.”