Cansu Gol lost her baby in the rubble of Turkey’s massive earthquake a year ago. Now she spends her time trying to heal the mental scars of her two surviving children.
One suffers from trauma-related attention deficit disorder and the other from speech problems, which emerged after the disaster on Feb. 6 last year in which 50,000 died across Turkey’s southeast.
For the 33-year-old mother, the improvised schools in a container city near the quake’s epicenter in Kahramanmaras Province offer a glimmer of hope.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“My seven-year-old daughter was pulled out alive from the rubble hours after the earthquake. Now she is suffering from attention deficit disorder,” Gol said. “She didn’t cry or scream at all, instead storing all the stress inside.”
Her four-and-a-half-year-old son began to speak after joining a nursery set up in one of the containers housing hundreds of thousands of survivors of Turkey’s deadliest disaster of modern times.
“He keeps asking about his brother [who died]. He says he flew away like a bird,” the mother said.
Teachers try to create an atmosphere of normality for the kids, each one of whom has lost homes, family and friends. All have varied levels of understanding what actually occurred.
A bust of post-Ottoman Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, stands in the courtyard, just as it would at any other school in the country.
The 20-student classrooms are decorated with balloons, adding color to a camp comprised of hundreds of identical white metal containers arranged in even rows.
Just a 10-minute walk away, empty spaces recall the apartment towers that stood in this Mediterranean city, once most famous for its ice cream.
“It is just as painful for the students as it is for the teachers,” said the school’s principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Turkish civil servants are barred from speaking to the media without authorization.
“Many things evoke the quake: aftershocks, the month of February or simply the snowfall,” which was heavy that fatal night, he said.
His school takes care of 850 children from diverse backgrounds.
They live in a container city housing 10,000 survivors, creating a tense atmosphere that breeds occasional bouts of violence.
“Cursing, offensive gestures, kicking — things won’t go well until these families are settled in apartments,” he said.
The principal said the state was doing its best, even housing teachers in the container cities so they can be near the kids.
“In which disaster is everything perfect?” he asked. “Life goes on.”
However, that life is a constant struggle, said Sara Resitoglu, 24.
“There’s no space. All our lives are in one room,” the young mother said.
Elif Yavuz and her husband tried to rebuild their lives in the nearby city of Mersin, following the path taken by more than 3 million people who left immediately after the quake.
However, like many others, the couple eventually moved back because their seven-year-old, who has heart problems, struggled to adapt.
“I resigned myself to returning and living in a container just so that she would not be upset,” the mother said.
Her daughter was now doing well in school. Yavuz plans to buy her a new pair of shoes as a reward for another excellent report card.
Away from the container camp, Fatih Yilanci joined the multitudes who spend days scouring city ruins for scrap metal they can sell to feed their families.
His apartment was only lightly damaged, meaning that his family did not automatically qualify for a container home.
However, his neighborhood is gone, as are most of his friends, who died in the ruins.
“Kahramanmaras has turned into a ghost city,” Yilanci said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS