Erol still believes he will see his children, Adaled says the hope of finding his sister is ebb and flow, and Tolga now just wants to get his parents’ bodies back so he can have a funeral.
The three look, sometimes expectantly, sometimes apathetically, at a pile of ruins, where once stood a seven-story building housing 100 people, in the center of the Turkish city of Kahramanmaras, one of the hardest hit by the earthquakes. which took place on Monday and which seriously affected the southeast of that country.
Adaled, Erol and Tolga have been in the same place 24 hours a day since Monday, waiting to find their relatives. The image is multiplied by other streets in Kahramanmaras, as well as other Turkish cities hit by the quake, where relatives wait beside the rubble for news, good or bad.
The three of them design the apartments and their original layout, to help rescue teams understand what now looks like a pile of rubble.
Adaled, 50 years old, shows Lusa her cracked and red hands from the cold that passes each day, waiting for news about her sister.
“The more time passes, the more hope is lost. It becomes more and more difficult to believe. There are seven days. From time to time hope comes, but from time to time hope also disappears”admits the woman.
In that building, which collapsed within seconds, 15 people have already been taken away alive, but the number of corpses that have already been followed in the mortuary vans is higher: fifty, another man says, still with relatives in that building.
Erol Ince managed to escape from a collapsing neighboring building, jumping out of one of the windows on the third floor, where he lived, using the rubble of a neighboring building, which fell in front of his house and served as a base to reach the ground. .
She waits, also 24 hours a day, for information about her two children, a 13-year-old boy and a 21-year-old girl, who will be buried.
“In the first two days, with the snow blocking the roads and accesses, we were here alone, without any help,” Erol noted, but stressed that it is not the government’s fault, “which is doing its job”.
Another man, who declined to be identified, warned that since it is a conservative region, where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party enjoys strong support, it will not be possible to hear criticism of how the Turkish government the situation has been dealt with. that he only saw a rescue team from Istanbul on the third day and “without any equipment”.
The more open criticism focuses on the builders of the buildings (more than 110 arrest warrants have already been issued against builders and civil engineers).
Tolga, a 43-year-old teacher, points out that the builder of the building where his parents lived is the same as all the other buildings that collapsed on that street, next to the stadium of the local football club.
Adaled and Erol confirm and point to all other collapsed buildings within 50 yards.
“All destroyed. All from the same builder,” says Adaled.
To the Lusa agency, Tolga says he expects to find his parents’ bodies in the building in front of him and his sister’s body, in the building next door, completely destroyed as well.
“I’m tired of waiting. I’ve been waiting here for seven days. I just want the bodies of my parents and sister taken away so I can have them buried and my mourning begin,” Tolga stressed, without any hope. .
Beside the place where the three wait, belongings of people who lived in the building pile up and are found in the rubble: cuddly toys in different colors, family photos, books, school notebooks, a children’s backpack, sports shoes and together to a power pole, a Quran that has been removed from the rubble and placed on top of technical books (the holy book should never be on the ground or with other objects on it).
Tolga stops to smoke, in silence, looking at the ruins of the building, where his parents will still be.
For a moment he looks away from the rubble and focuses on a pink notebook that has just been retrieved from the rubble by a volunteer and thrown onto the pile of stuff.
Tolga carefully picks up the notebook and leafs through it – it belongs to a girl who had been found dead the day before.
The professor lets out a slight smile and a tender look as he reads.
Soon after, a cousin of his arrives with photographs recovered from the rubble of the neighboring building, where his sister is said to be.
Tolga grabs a photo pass, retrieved from the rubble, and cries compulsively. He strokes it with his hand as if it were a caress and carefully puts the photo in his wallet.
“It was my sister,” he says, conjugating the verb in the past, already discrediting any chance of finding her alive.
Source: DN
