Desperate earthquake survivors search for shelter

Two weeks ago, Lutfi Yoci hosted a 30th birthday party for her daughter, Yesim, in the southern Turkish city of Antakya. She bought an iced donut and invited a bunch of the neighbors over.

Three days later, neighbors returned in the middle of the night to unpack Yesim from under her house, which had collapsed into the shaky mountainside that paved the town.

“It was as if the earth was boiling,” said Mrs. Yoss, 66, remembering how the earth shuddered when her son carried her daughter’s body off the mountain.

She and her son hunkered down in a cave for several days before joining neighbors in a tent camp beside an ancient monastery. They are among an estimated one million Turks displaced by an earthquake this month that devastated a large swath of Turkey and western Syria.

“I had everything, now I have nothing,” said Mrs. Yoss, noting that she had also lost a son in the earthquake. She said she has four surviving children, all of whom are homeless. “I can’t go back there again – but what can I do, I have nowhere to go.”

More than 40,000 people in Turkey died in the earthquake and strong aftershocks. Some 47,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, sending more than a million people to temporary shelters, according to the International Rescue Committee. Millions more still need food, shelter, electricity, water and latrines. Many of them have spent close to two weeks outdoors, sometimes facing freezing weather.

The Turkish government, along with aid workers from agencies such as the Red Crescent and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is grappling with the massive challenge of housing people in earthquake-stricken areas of Turkey.

A park in the city of Adiyaman has become a distribution point for survivors, filled with tents set up by Turkey’s national emergency management agency, AFAD. Picnic areas are filled with volunteers cooking giant vats of soup, while others hand out water, diapers, blankets, milk, biscuits, and non-perishable foods.

Deadly earthquake in Turkey and Syria An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale on February 6 with its epicenter in Gaziantep, Turkey has become one of the deadliest natural disasters of this century.

Erdal Akslan and his wife Selman Aklan were resting under some trees. The house they lived in with their three children was damaged in the earthquake, so they were outside for a day before Mr. Axlan found plastic sheeting and wooden beams to build a makeshift tent in an empty yard. They couldn’t get a tent AFAD.

He said, “I asked 50 times and couldn’t get a tent.”

Also in Adiyaman, Kadir Erdel, 60, a shop owner whose house was badly damaged in the earthquake, said he moved with his wife and their three adult children to a park where there are no nearby buildings that could fall on them.

He said, “We have two blankets and two rugs to put on, but at night, they are not enough to stop the cold.”

Conditions are generally worse for many of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey’s earthquake zone.

In the town of Bisni, Mohammed Makhzoum, 31, said he, his wife and their three children barely escaped from their home during the earthquake. They met other Syrian families in their area, and many of them settled in the tree nursery where Mr. Makhzoum works.

There were multiple families there, and it was estimated that dozens of women and children had crowded into the three-room nursery building. For the first few nights the men and boys were kept exposed outside, but the nurseryman brought them a large tent to sleep in.

They were in a small town, and they didn’t receive any help from the government.

In response to growing public frustration with his government’s relief efforts, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said he intends to construct enough “high quality and safe buildings within one year” to “satisfy housing needs across the entire earthquake zone”.

For now, the government is relying on a range of short-term solutions: Repurposed shipping containers have popped up like improvised trailer parks. Gymnasiums, hotels, and university dormitories swarmed with people. A cruise ship is scheduled to arrive at the port city of Iskenderun to accommodate thousands more.

The exit route from Antakya presents a panoramic view of the outpouring of support for the survivors. Cars stacked with bags of clothes from local charities weave around tractors as they push through the rubble. Mobile kitchens advertise soup and tea, ambulances and trucks stacked with sacks of rice and flour.

Across the ravaged landscape, in parks and other open areas, tents and makeshift shelters displaying letters from relief groups emerge from the rubble.

Disaster and Emergency Management has set up more official camps in parking lots all over Antakya. They offer some of the best conditions those in the quake zone could hope for: tents are made of thick, waterproof canvas and have wood or coal heaters.

But having a tent is a privilege not given to everyone.

“We are the only Turkish families here,” said Nadim Sahin, 24, who has been living for five days in an AFAD camp housing about 1,200 people outside the stadium. “There were Syrians before we moved here, but they were forced to leave.”

Near the stadium, a boy and girl push a cart full of clothes and toys donated from a mosque into an olive grove, where a large family of 150 Syrians has set up tents behind the shade of the building compound where they once lived.

“The Disaster and Emergency Department refused to give us tents, so we made our own,” said Muhammed Qasim Khadija, 23. His family’s shelter was covered with carpets and tarpaulins. Pieces of furniture were placed outside, as well as utensils and other belongings that Mr. Khadija had retrieved from his apartment.

“Life goes on,” said Subhi Khadija, the uncle of Mr. Khadija, who fled the Syrian civil war with his family eight years ago and was working in construction before the earthquake. Now, he and his wife only ate one meal a day to ensure their eight children had enough to eat. There was a war in Syria. An earthquake occurred in Turkey. But we’re still alive.”

The uncle and his nephew said that even with the support of international humanitarian organisations, local aid groups and generous residents, some people, like Khadija, did not receive help. They depended on food salvaged from their homes or sent by relatives living outside the earthquake zone.

Some of the volunteers had visited the family, ferrying aid across the country in their own cars. Doğukan Manku, 42, a disc jockey, drove more than 11 hours from Istanbul, stopping in towns along the way to pick up tanks of water and clothes, which he gave to the Syrians.

“I dropped everything to get here,” he said, adding that a number of his friends have fanned out across the hardest-hit areas in an effort to reach areas that aid groups like AFAD are unlikely to visit.

So far, at least 368,874 tents have been dispatched to the quake zone, of which 172,265 tents have been set up, the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority said on Thursday. The government has also reallocated 5,400 shipping containers for housing, and at least 890,000 people are being housed in state-run dormitories and facilities. Erdogan said on Tuesday that about 50,000 victims were staying in hotels.

In the city of Adana, about 80 miles from the epicenter, an extensive network of gyms, mosques and hotels has been converted into shelters for tens of thousands of victims.

Omar Kahraman was one of hundreds of survivors who took refuge last week at the Adana Garden Business Hotel.

“I am very happy with Adana’s hospitality,” he said, as he reclined among a group of people huddled on cushions in the hotel’s softly lit ballroom. Kahraman said it took rescue workers eight hours to pull him from the rubble of his six-storey building in Kahramanmaras. He was taken to Adana by military helicopter so that he could treat his two broken legs.

“I made friends here that I will never forget my whole life,” he said.

Others described being trapped in an infuriating limbo, being moved from place to place while they waited for officials to confirm their homes were safe to return to.

“Last week, we were in a swimming pool. We are now in a gym,” said Dilek Tekerlik, 48, lying on a thin mattress in a corner of the gymnasium where her family has been sleeping for the past five days.

More than a dozen families were sheltering in the gymnasium in Adana, sleeping on rugs in small groups. Small feet and hands protruded from under thin blankets. Mothers scroll on their mobile phones, searching for news of people who have been displaced or disappeared under the rubble.

Next to her were a few suitcases, some plastic bags, and her three children, Mrs. Teckerlake lamented that they would soon have to move.

“We were told we would have to leave this place,” she said of the Turkish Sports Ministry, which organized the shelter and declined to comment on where the families would be moved. “We don’t know what’s next – we have nothing to go back to.”

Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Adiyaman, Turkey, Raja Abdurrahim from Adana, Turkey, and Gulsin Harman from Istanbul.

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