It’s a peaceful place, almost quiet. A few birds accompany the melody as the leaves of some cypresses and pines whistle in the icy breeze that sings into the space. Some melting snow falling from the branches to the sides slides through the trees and falls to the ground.
There, hundreds of people on earth are taking it, rest. Some have been lying here for years, even decades. Others, a very large minority, just for a few days. “This Friday is the first day this is quiet. First since Monday. Thursday, all the days before that… everything was packed, all families, lots of people. “Everything overflowed,” says Hüseyin, who lives in the Şekeroba district of Kahramanmaraş; The epicenter of the earthquake that struck last Monday morning.
Around the man is a cemetery, the size of which exceeds all expectations: the number of old tombstones and tombs is almost on par with new ones that were hastily built in the last hours. The terrain, the materials, the names of the deceased give it away: there was no time to explain who lies here, who lies below, because the others are coming. Şekeroba, a town of 11,000 inhabitants, lost more than 800 in a week.
“The families, as best they can, deceased They go to the cemetery and bury themselves. There is no service for this. A prosecutor came to town a few days ago. He wrote down the names of the deceased who told him and left. This much. For example, tonight two funerals. One of them had three dead. It was a mother and her two children who were found dead and embraced. Their bodies were together, there was a very strong smell,” explains Hüseyin.
Cities and towns
Everything in southeastern Turkey is disorderly. The total death toll between Turkey and Syria is currently 22,300, but each affected region received a different penalty; A sentence descending or increasing according to the orography and the tectonic plates that cut the ground. However, the treatment in the same area was also different: to save They came to the region -Turkish and international- but focused on delivery above all else. aid and rescue missions Of course, in cities where there are more people trapped under the runes and needy on top of them.
Affected villages are also almost deserted. There, help almost did not come. “We gotwow, food, some drugs… all this happened just a few days ago,” says Aziz, a villager on the Şekeroba side of Beyoğlu district in Kahramanmaraş province. Help came in the form of food, but we didn’t get enough stores and that’s a problem. We do not have electrical or sanitary and hygiene products sufficient. Going to the toilet is a problem, and if it continues like this, we could get sick.
Help, says Aziz, came late, thank goodness. But rescuers never did. “I took it out myself two people [de los escombros]. Their buildings had collapsed on them and we managed to get them out after they died. I didn’t take anyone out alive, but the other neighbors did. Here and in other towns… everyone had to do it on their own,” says Aziz, and of course he understands that there has been a lot of damage. too much dead, Just as it is not possible to reach everything, one cannot understand what it means to pull a dead neighbor out of a rubble heap in his own town, house or neighbor.
Shops, shops, shops
Şekeroba is now a neighborhood five days after the earthquake. ruin mountain, roofs on the ground, living rooms and dining rooms thrown into the street, chickens and cows in the rubble, and most of all, shops and bonfires surrounding all the destruction.
But they are few in number, residents assure, very few have arrived and more stores are needed to accommodate everyone. The majority continue to sleep outside after five days: “Please, please! Tell your superiors. We are really grateful to them and we need this food but the shops we really need the most, there is not enough, there is not enough for everyone,” asks a female volunteer, who brought donuts and pasta to the public in her truck.
From afar, Halil, a local farmer and family man, watches the scene. The man was lucky: his House, although it has become unusable, it is still standing, but the walls may collapse if you look with a little force. Halil and his wife were able to re-enter and take up arms on the Monday after the earthquake. plastics, fabrics, ropes: build your own tent. They’ve been sleeping there ever since.
“Luckily we’re fine now. chickens and the help we got, we have everything we need to survive these days, says Halil. But that night… In that destroyed house in the back, we drilled holes in the ceiling, so we tried, so, as we know. A child… a mother… a father… we brought them all dead”.