Dozens of people from the U.S. wrote to me after the massive earthquakes hit Türkiye on Feb. 6, asking if I am OK and if my loved ones here are safe.
My answer is, yes, we are alive but no, we are not OK.
“Anne, can I sleep with you tonight?” my 11-year-old son has asked every night since the massive earthquakes devastated the southeast. The quakes hit areas nearly 3,000 kilometers (about 800 miles) from Istanbul, where we live. We didn’t feel the tremors. Not all of us in the country personally know those affected, and we cannot compare the remote anguish we feel watching from afar to the absolute desperation and despair of those in the affected regions. But the universal feeling of helplessness is palpable.
Last Monday evening, hours after the quakes struck, my husband and I rushed to donate blood. We bundled up the kids and went to a nearby Turkish Red Crescent (Kızılay) donation center – and were turned away. So many people showed up that the Turkish Red Crescent had exceeded its storage capacity of 40,000 units. It was inspiring to witness and a firsthand example for our kids of the small things one person can do to reach out to others in need. A few days later, on Wednesday, I came home from work to learn that my 14-year-old daughter had spent all day helping sort donations for the quake victims at a nearby city-run campaign.
“It is better than not doing anything,” she told me after she got home, her voice full of sadness.
Every channel we switch to, every social media platform we scroll through shows us what the southeastern regions are still facing: ruined cities full of rubble.
For the first week, the faint voices of those buried alive cried out for help. Sometimes survivors and relatives could only wait nearby, forced to listen to the terrified pleas with no way to move the tons of concrete.
We celebrated as people were pulled out days after the buildings collapsed, miracles attesting to what one can endure to survive. Yet, for every person that was pulled out, thousands of others were already lost.
On Saturday, six days after the earthquakes, we took our kids to the Anatolian side of the city for a change of scenery. We crossed over the sparkling Bosporus. It was exceptionally beautiful that day, the strait clear, cold and graceful, flowing between both sides of the massive metropolis.
In most neighborhoods, Istanbul is a labyrinth of multistory apartment buildings precariously lining narrow, hilly streets. My daughter, normally a quiet introvert, kept blurting out assessments about the city as it flowed by her passenger-side window. “Anne, look. This neighborhood wouldn’t withstand an earthquake. The houses are too old and too close together. All of those people would die. How could anyone save them?”
My son chimed in before we could answer or change the subject: “What about our house? Is it safe, Anne? Is it better to be on the top floor or the bottom?”
The reality of where we live and the possibility of what could happen had sunk in, and they were afraid.
After a while, my husband and I ran out of topics to redirect their minds, so we engaged in a conversation that parents dread – we couldn’t quell their fear. Our worried kids now understand the reality of living in an unprepared, earthquake-prone city of nearly 20 million people. We cannot sugarcoat the details they have heard. They know tens of thousands of people died in this recent disaster – and that Istanbul would be much worse. In Hatay, one little girl, 10 years old, had to have her arm, crushed under a huge cement slab for days, amputated before they could pull her out of the rubble. Take a moment to let the horror of that sink in. Now consider how you could explain it to your kids.
Children are natural lie detectors. They know when we are glazing over the facts or not directly answering questions.
“We live on the top floor of a four-story building. Our building is quite new and was built by a reputable company. We have a good chance of being OK,” was all we could say.
“What about a 9.0 earthquake?” my son asked.
“No building can withstand that,” we said because, as an avid YouTube watcher, he already knew the answer.
You can try to keep your children away from the bombardment on TV or social media. Anyone with older kids knows that is impossible, so I won’t insult your intelligence by offering useless advice about it. I warned my kids not to linger on the content for long and advised them not to focus on the issue all the time – and for the most part, they seem to have taken my advice. Their intense worry is starting to fade as days go by. They are carrying on with their young lives, haunted by a tinge of sadness, mostly accepting that we cannot predict what will happen in the future.
As for the rest of us, a week later, hope is fading for anyone being pulled out alive from the debris. Deep grief has set in for the more than 30,000 that were killed and the hundreds of thousands of survivors now displaced. I can tell you personally that I am not ready to explore the psychology behind how we are feeling. I could copy and paste advice from a psychiatrist to try to offer you some peace of mind or guidelines about how to “prepare” yourself and your loved ones for these kinds of disasters. The truth is, there is nothing that can prepare you for the raw despair you feel for those affected and the selfish fear that creeps in for your own family, home, property and safety as you go down the rabbit hole of “what ifs.”
This is simply a glimpse into the observations of an expat who has lived in Türkiye for close to 20 years. I love this country as much as my own and though we all know Turks are strong, it will take a long time for this deep wound to heal.
