Gül, a single mother with her six children around her, says she doesn’t know how it happened but that it happened. That when everyone woke up at night and her house began to shake, they all got together and she began to pray. She came out on its own, she says, and that she prayed and that she prayed and that’s when, an eternity of seconds later, the shaking stopped.
They all left home. The building collapsed. “Luckily we are all fine, and I think we have been very lucky. Now we have a kind of roof, and hot food that they give us,” says Gül, a resident of the city of osmaniyein the south of Turkeyone of the most affected by the earthquake from last Monday.
In Osmaniye, she and her family are lucky. In the south of the city, in a former amusement park, the Turkish emergency services have created a city of tents which would seem infinite if it were not for the fact that the attractions limit it. “Now we are housing about 3,000 people, and we try to know exactly who is in each place, how many people in each tent,” explains a volunteer.
buildings in danger
Osmaniye, now, is a changed city. At first glance, the place does not seem as affected as other places: collapsed buildings are, yes, everywhere, but most of the houses and dwellings are still standing. But they do it conditionally, almost unintentionally: it is difficult to find a building that is not damaged, crooked, without a wall that misses its former back.
“My house did not fall, but the whole neighborhood will have to be pulled down. There is no safe building anymore,” explains a neighbor. Thus, the inhabitants of this neighborhood —and of dozens of neighborhoods in the region, both in the south of Turkey and in the north of Syria— have become homeless overnight.
Some, like Gül and his son Mehmet, have a roof, even if it is made of plastic. Most sleep on the street or in cars. “We have friends who are having to sleep roughMany people who have nothing. And they stay with other families in vans or cars,” says Gül.
Mehmet, next to him, is a little more optimistic. “Trucks of clothes, food, water, tea, blankets are arriving here… It’s very cold at night, but I think we’re fine,” says the son. Her mother does not scold her but she stays close to her: “Yes, but we know that in the villages and further south, in Antakya, the situation is desperate. There are many places where help has not reached“.
a complicated answer
The figures, frenetic, are impossible to follow. The easy one is this: 5,000 buildings collapsed; tens of thousands with damage. The difficult one is more than 12,000 dead between Turkey and Syria, which keep adding up as the hours go by.
“Of course, there deficiencies [en las tareas de rescate]. It is impossible to be prepared for such a catastrophe,” said the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, However, he has been critical of those who criticize him and his government for the lack of preparation and speed of response in some affected places.
“This is a time for unity, solidarity. At a time like this, I cannot stand people who create negative campaigns for their political interest,” said the Turkish president, who has announced that the hotels on the coast of Antalya and Mersin, a zone of summer resorts, will be opened free of charge for the new refugees created by the earthquake.
Given the upward criticism, in addition, access to Twitter has been blocked in Turkey this Wednesday afternoon. Since Monday, in fact, the Turkish police have arrested a dozen people for having published critical messages against Ankara’s management of the earthquake.
an infinite work
Meanwhile, across the region, rescue efforts continue, despite waning hopes. “Every second, every minute that passes gives us much more pain and puts us in a worse and worse situation. My house is nearby, and it has some damage, albeit minor. But I have a friend here,” says Cem, another Osmaniye resident. . ‘Here’, for Cem, is a mountain of rubble that two days ago was an eight-story building.
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Beside him, a hundred people stare at the mountain and the rescue teams on it, scratching and removing, with buckets, cranes and their hands, everything they can. “Shut up everyone! Shut up everyone!” shouts a worker. The silence is total, it scares. “Tonight, Yusuf, who is in there, sent an SMS asking for help. Now they are trying to see if he is still alive,” a woman whispers, trying not to break the silence around her too much.
“Now the rescue teams are here, but the first day no one came. That day we came to the building, and we heard screams from inside the rubble. Now you can’t hear anything anymore. I have loved ones in there, you know? I can’t be I’m glad to still be alive,” she’s honest.