The Portuguese rescue team in Turkey is focused on recovering bodies for the relatives waiting for them, attempting a dignified operation and acknowledging that it’s not just a body that leaves, it’s a story that ends.
If at the beginning, when the Portuguese team found a corpse, it left only a technical mark to indicate its presence and continued to search for the living, since Monday the strategy has changed.
Now, in the collapsed buildings of Antakya (southeast) where bodies are known to be, efforts are being made to rescue them to ensure families can grieve after the earthquakes that devastated parts of Turkey and Syria last week.
“What is being done is trying to find bodies. Since Monday, according to instructions from the Turkish authorities, the mission has been to find dead people and remove them” from the rubble, the second commander of the Portuguese operation in Turkey, Joaquim Santos .
Throughout the process, there is concern that the delivery of the body to the relatives is “as dignified as possible,” INEM doctor Inês Simões of the Portuguese team in Turkey told the Lusa agency.
“It’s not just about disposing of bodies. This is the end of a lot of stories,” he insisted, highlighting that poorly executed grief “can cause traumatic experiences.”
“To believe or not to believe in another life, it is a body. It is always an end,” Inês stressed.
“This intervention is also very important for INEM psychologist Joana Anjos”.
On Sunday, the Portuguese in the center removed a couple in their 30s. The woman was four months pregnant and had just found out the sex of the baby.
The two held each other under the rubble.
“It’s not two corpses. It’s two bodies hugging each other,” says Joana Anjos.
On Tuesday, the work took place in the south of Antakya, in places where the Portuguese team had already been on Wednesday and where they had identified bodies.
The team arrives at a building where two people have been taken alive and with evidence of a body in the basement of the building severely affected by the earthquake.
Operations identify the location of the body and decide to proceed with the use of angle grinders and pneumatic hammers to make a hole in the wall.
There’s a dead woman lying on a bed there.
INEM psychologist Joana Anjos visits the family members and talks to them.
“When we find someone’s object, we try to understand who wants to receive the object, we explain what condition it’s in, and we always try to anticipate the person for what comes next. We also try to understand if they want specific clothes wrap up the body when they go out or want to see it,” he explains.
Joana Anjos speaks in English with the victim’s son, Mehmet, 28 years old.
He explains that he is going to see the body and that he will tell him later what condition it is in so that his son can decide whether to see it or not.
About an hour later, a simple wooden coffin appears in front of the body, brought by the family.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” say several attendees in Turkish, while a family member calls out the woman’s name: “Leila, Leila!”
When the body is removed, properly covered and placed in the coffin, Mehmet, moved, makes it a point to hug all the Portuguese agents on the ground one by one.
He lost his mother and also his sister, who died in the hospital after being taken alive from those same ruins.
“Sometimes I feel crazy,” Lusa tells the young man who worked in Dubai and traveled to his homeland as soon as possible.
During the hugs to the Portuguese, he keeps repeating: “I will never forget you”.
Source: DN
