These young children survived the earthquake in Türkiye, but the battle for their lives is only just beginning

Some of the youngest survivors of the Türkiye earthquake were just children.

The little boy is among dozens of children brought to an orphanage in the coastal city of Mersin, Turkey, after a devastating earthquake two months ago.

He was among the children found under the rubble of collapsed buildings after the quake. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Unlike adults, children who survived under collapsed buildings were helpless under twisted metal and concrete, and less able to contact nearby rescuers, let alone message friends with their location.

A nurse supervises two children playing in an infant orphanage. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

The staff at the orphanage takes turns working through the night, watching over their wards.

A Turkish nanny holds a young baby in an orphanage, hoping to lull the baby back to sleep. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Every evening, two nannies, Meral Demir Kiran and Gönül Çapuk, make their way through the nursery, picking up and feeding each child, while feeding them from a bottle.

At one end of the room a little boy reaches beyond the edge of his bed and gurgles plaintively.

Mrs. Chubbuck rushes to reassure him while juggling another child with her other arm.

Once this is done, the pair gently replace each baby in their cots for the night.

“Our hands are always full of children,” says Demirkiran.

“We try not to let them feel too much sadness. We cry with them when they cry.”

(ABC News: Tom Joyner) Some babies cling tightly to staff (ABC News: Tom Joyner) Babies range in age from newborn to six years old (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

The orphanage, a squat concrete building on a main road next to a dental hospital, was once a private drug rehabilitation clinic. Metal gratings line the stairwell like the bars in a prison cell.

The small library contains translations of Steinbeck and Twilight. At the back of the building is a dilapidated basketball court.

When the earthquake struck in February, 35 orphanage staff—psychologists, nurses, teachers, and administrators—were deployed to the quake zone to provide assistance.

Today, it is one of dozens of centers across the region housing a wave of children lost in the chaos of the February disaster, with no homes to return to and no family to claim.

In many cases, the children’s parents were among the more than 50,000 killed or presumed dead.

Orphanage staff watch over the children in their care. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

“We try to do the best we can for the children,” says Zelal Shakar, one of the orphanage’s three psychologists who provide ongoing counseling.

“I’ve been working with kids for eight or nine years, and I’ve never seen kids so hungry for love.”

In a small room at the end of a long corridor, a group of seven children are making colorful works of art under the supervision of two social workers.

A boy climbs onto a table to grab a pencil from a girl sitting opposite him, squeaking. Two sisters sit immersed, painting identical grassy landscapes.

On the walls around them he hung some done work—scribbles of Disney princesses and a scene depicting two swaying palms and a small sailboat drifting into the sunset.

“They were in bad shape when they arrived,” says Merv Errol, a gym instructor who spent the morning teaching the kids how to somersault.

They were not mentally healthy.”

Turkish and Syrian children orphaned by earthquakes take part in an art class organized by social workers. (ABC News: Tom Joyner) Artwork by Turkish and Syrian children orphaned by earthquakes hangs on the wall of a classroom in a social service center where they live (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Art classes, along with physical conditioning and reading lessons, have become part of a new daily routine for children.

Behind the scenes, caseworkers scramble to track down any remaining relatives who might offer a more permanent home.

Authorities relied largely on DNA matching to link the children to surviving family members.

“Families have contacted us about their missing children, but, you know, the faces of the children are hard to distinguish,” says Salman Fidan, the director of the orphanage.

There are a lot of cases where children end up in foster or foster care.

In some cases, children will spend their childhood years in the welfare system, moving from foster home to foster home, until the day they turn 18.

Occasionally, their affairs professionals stumble upon good news. A team in Adana, a city in the east, has matched a child in their care with a loved one missing in Syria.

The city authorities are now preparing for a cross-border reunion.

A corridor inside an orphanage for children orphaned by earthquakes shows some painted murals and a metal grill covering the stairwell. : Tom Joyner)

They may not show it outwardly, but each child suffers from such deep-rooted trauma from the earthquakes that the orphanage staff fear will not fully disintegrate until they are older.

The children developed close emotional bonds with the staff, jumping into their arms and burying their faces in their chests as if they were with their parents.

The staff have become equally fond of the children, who do not hesitate to playfully pull their hair while falling into fits of laughter.

Many find it hard to imagine the idea of ​​children eventually being given up in foster care.

“They hold us tight,” says Errol, who has two young children.

“We are very sad that they will eventually leave.”

Staff observe Turkish and Syrian children playing in a room of a social service : Tom Joyner)

One particularly thorny task, says psychologist Ms Shakar, was finding a way to explain to children the dramatic and sudden change in their lives caused by the earthquakes.

Some are too young to understand the death of their parents.

She adds, “In Turkish culture, we don’t say that someone is dead. We say ‘died’ or ‘wasted’. But they cannot understand these words.”

“We’ve had meetings with the kids where we’re trying to get them to confront their feelings. Otherwise, it’s going to hit them more in the future than now.”

The twin earthquakes of February deeply wounded an entire generation of children in southern Turkey and Syria.

A group of boys play soccer on a street in Turkey near the port where many buildings were destroyed in the earthquakes (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Some of the millions affected are so young that they will remember no time before the earthquakes – yet their whole lives will be forever defined by them.

Two months after the earthquakes, some of the chaos has been cleared, but millions of Turks are coping with a new difficulty: surviving in the rubble without a home or livelihood.

The days after the disaster brought with them intense attention – rescue teams, aid workers and television crews flocked from all over the world.

Today, the eyes of the world moved.

In Hatay province, tents to shelter the homeless have sprung up everywhere.

Inside, there are only mattresses, blankets, and a few scanty possessions salvaged from the collapsed remains of residents’ homes. Water and food are scarce.

In the village of Sutashi, nestled in the foothills of the Nur Mountains on the Mediterranean coast, nearly 100 people have moved into a handful of tents set up in a forecourt along a main street.

A group of children stand in the makeshift camp where they live in their village after their homes were destroyed or damaged in earthquakes. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

The residents—all families whose homes in nearby blocks have been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable—share a single toilet in the neighbours’ backyard.

For food, some have managed to salvage handfuls of supplies from the ruins of their homes, while others rely on aid donations and the plum plums that grow in abundance across the valley.

“It’s not suitable to live here,” says Ghazi Tom, one of the group of village men who cut down a forest of trees to prepare tents.

At first, Mr. Tom and his wife lived with 16 others in one tent, until it became too crowded and the families split up.

They didn’t have to move far.

A row of tents pitched in a tent camp on campus grounds. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Each tent in the camp is separated by a narrow corridor barely a foot wide.

Nearly a hundred people live in the camp and were displaced by the earthquakes. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

There is little privacy though and the neighbors treat each other with respect. Meals are shared and adults watch other parents’ children as well as their own.

“Things don’t have to be this way,” says Tom, visibly frustrated.

“This is an earthquake-prone area. But nobody in the government has yet made plans for that.”

Anger erupted among millions of Turks in the quake zone in February as they waited for help from a government that many believe came too late, or in some cases not at all.

Some have been reduced to digging through snow-covered rubble with their bare hands in search of missing relatives, even as international rescue teams reach major cities in the north.

A stack of home photos shows an unidentified woman and her family abandoned on the ground near a destroyed apartment building. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

In Sotashi and nearby villages, that anger has escalated in the two months since the earthquakes. White-hot anger has melted away, giving way to resignation and frustration.

Within weeks, nationwide elections will determine the future of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose leadership during the disaster is a major election issue.

“Of course people here have already decided how they’re going to vote,” says Tom.

As he speaks, Mr. Tom steps very carefully between the concrete blocks, holding the edges of the tents.

“How many people live here in this tent?” asks the 11-year-old named Haider.

Turkish boy Haydar, 11, stands in a street in his village near the camp where he lives. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

For a moment, the man counts out loud—”Your mother, your father, your grandmother”—before the boy answers: Five.

The children in the camp have missed months of schooling.

Another girl says, “Our parents don’t allow us to go to school. Someone should build us a prefabricated school.”

“We are afraid to go back. We could die there if another earthquake happens,” Haider agrees.

In the summer, camp residents worry about invading wildlife such as snakes, as well as the high temperatures.

Even by mid-April, it’s uncomfortable to put up with tents in the middle of the day.

For the millions of Turks displaced in the disaster, there are no clear plans for how long they will live in this kind of temporary existence.

The earthquake-ravaged neighborhoods of many cities have yet to be cleared, let alone rebuilt.

This could take years.

A lone tree stands in a rubble-covered street near the port. Some of the rubble has been removed, but many damaged or destroyed buildings remain. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

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