“We’ve been here four, no, three days now. Friday morning we left for Turkey with 150 volunteers. It is a diverse group: doctors, nurses, construction workers, all people who found each other through a call on WhatsApp. A spontaneous action, there is no large organization behind it. Two Turkish-Dutch entrepreneurs set this up.
“After we landed in Gaziantep, we were split into smaller teams. AFAD, the Turkish aid organization, drove our team by bus to the city of Adiyaman. We reported there: what can we do? A medical post had been set up on the university campus, which has been expanded considerably in recent days. There are now two large tents outside in which we can treat people. Right now I’m looking out over a sea of mattresses. Normally students congregate here, now care workers sleep side by side. I’m glad I can warm up for a bit. It’s very cold. Today it was minus six.
“We mainly provide care to people who are not seriously ill but who do need urgent help. The first few days I think we saw a thousand to fifteen hundred people. People who have jumped from two or three highs, or who have not had access to their medicines for days. Today I had a patient with a nail abscess: an injury from hand digging in the rubble. We see bladder infections and a lot of pneumonia. And more and more diarrhoea.
“Luckily there are three ambulances, with which we can go to remote villages. A few of us can interpret, so communication is usually not a problem. We receive a lot of medicines and medical supplies. There is a shortage of morphine and antibiotics.
“This disaster is so unimaginably big, only when you are here do you understand how big the disaster is. It’s not just about destroyed buildings: hundreds of thousands of people are homeless, their lives are completely disrupted. Everyone, really everyone, has lost someone. Yet people help each other and are grateful.
“There is also a lot of solidarity within our team. I want to emphasize that we are doing this together, with GPs Bünyamin Meral, Mohammed Aleem and my wife Sevilay Temel, among others. Despite the difficult circumstances, there has not been a moment of discussion. A comment we received here was: you talk to each other and suddenly arrange something. How is that possible? We explained: in the Netherlands we like to organize. We took that characteristic with us to the disaster area.”