As they reckoned with shocking images on social media and the long wait for news from home, the world's Turkish diaspora, which includes some 20 million people, has rallied to provide support to one another and send aid to their family members far away.
In Melbourne, Australia, where the Turkish-Australian community exceeds an estimated 300,000 people, dozens of volunteers packed three shipping containers with cardboard boxes full of new tents, blankets and sleeping bags. They are expected to arrive in quake-damaged areas within a few days, and supplies will be flown to Turkey on Thursday morning.
Kasiye Kuru, one of the organizers of the effort, said everyone has a friend who has been affected by the sun, as her daughter rubbed sunscreen onto her cheeks. She said that a friend who had left Australia to move to Gaziantep, Turkey, close to the epicenter of the quake, had lost her home. She built that home with so much love and care, but what do you do? There were a lot of emotions happening here, said Bea Tercan, one of the organizers of the equipment drive. A lot of people are crying and a lot of people are feeling the pain, not getting through to their loved ones, which has been devastating. It is the worst to not know where someone is, whether they are alive, whether they are just screaming for help, or just to hear someone scream for help. Volunteers secured boxes with tape and packed full of supplies as children watched in school uniforms.
People shared accounts of relatives and friends displaced by the quakes and discussed images they had seen on social media and news accounts of the disaster as a Turkish flag fluttered from one of the shipping containers.
Kamil Kolay said he had cried all the way here, and that he had donated 60 new tents and described seeing footage of a child who had been pulled from the rubble. He was two months old and killed me. One man said he was from the city of Kirikhan, Turkey, in Hatay Province, and that he had lost several family members, including a cousin whose wife and child had also died.
It came as little surprise that the community had been able to come together in such a way, said Ms. Tercan.
We did this for the bush fires in Australia back in 2019 She said that we got the community together and we did it again. When there is a crisis, the Turkish community knows how to get together. The footage of people struggling amid the wreckage brought back vivid memories of her experiences as a survivor of the 1999 earthquake in Izmit, Turkey, in which more than 17,000 people died.
She said she knows what they are living through. You can never imagine it until you live it, and I pray no one lives it.