574 youngsters pulled from collapsed buildings have been discovered with none surviving mother and father.

Kahramanmaras, Turkey:

Serkan Tatoglu is haunted by the query his six-year-old retains asking since their home collapsed in final week’s earthquake in Turkey.
“Are we going to die?” she wonders, whereas wanting up at scenes harking back to an apocalyptic film set.

Coffins line roadsides, and ambulance sirens wail across the clock.

Strolling via the rubble of flattened buildings, youngsters watch as rescue staff raise physique luggage from the putrid-smelling particles.

Tatoglu helped his 4 youngsters — aged between six and 15 — escape their home after the primary 7.8-magnitude tremor rattled southeastern Turkey and elements of Syria earlier than daybreak on February 6.

Their constructing crumbled in one of many practically 3,000 aftershocks. Greater than 35,000 have died throughout the area and the toll is prone to maintain climbing for days.

Tatoglu misplaced practically a dozen family members.

However the 41-year-old is aware of he has to face sturdy within the face of his insufferable heartache.

Tatoglu’s first job is to defend his youngsters from the horrors that maintain popping into their heads as they wait out the aftershocks in a tent metropolis close to the quake’s epicentre in southern Kahramanmaras.

“The youngest, traumatised by the aftershocks, retains asking: ‘Dad, are we going to die?'” Tatoglu mentioned.

“She retains asking about our family members. I do not present them their lifeless our bodies. My spouse and I hug them and say ‘all the pieces is alright’.”

‘I can not do something’ 

Psychologist Sueda Deveci of the Medical doctors Worldwide Turkey volunteer organisation mentioned adults want as a lot emotional help as youngsters within the aftermath of such a tragedy.

She mentioned older generations have been faster to internalise the profound scale of how a lot their lives have modified — and simply how a lot they’ve misplaced.

“One mom instructed me: ‘Everybody tells me to be sturdy, however I can not do something. I can not maintain my children, I can not eat’,” Deveci mentioned whereas working within the tent metropolis.

Deveci is gaining higher perception into what the kids are feeling from what they draw as they whereas away the time within the chilly.

“I do not discuss to them concerning the earthquake a lot. We’re drawing. We’ll see how a lot of it’s mirrored of their drawings,” she mentioned.

For now, their artwork is usually regular.

Little one rights skilled Esin Koman mentioned this was as a result of youngsters adapt to their environment extra shortly than adults.

However she added that the quake’s destruction of present social help networks left them dangerously uncovered to long-term trauma.

“Some youngsters have misplaced their households. There may be no one now to supply them with psychological help,” Koman mentioned.

‘The place’s my mum?’

Psychologist Cihan Celik posted one trade on Twitter he had with a paramedic concerned in rescue work.

The paramedic instructed Celik that children pulled from the rubble nearly instantly requested about their lacking mother and father.

“The wounded youngsters ask: ‘The place’s my mum, the place’s my dad? Are you kidnapping me?’,” the paramedic recalled.

Turkey’s vp Fuat Oktay mentioned 574 youngsters pulled from collapsed buildings have been discovered with none surviving mother and father.

Solely 76 had been returned to different members of the family.

One voluntary psychologist working in a youngsters’s help centre in Hatay province — the place the extent of destruction was a number of the worst in Turkey — mentioned quite a few mother and father have been frantically on the lookout for lacking children.

“We obtain a barrage of calls about lacking youngsters,” Hatice Goz mentioned by cellphone from Hatay province.

“But when the kid nonetheless can not converse, the household is unable to search out them.”

Glad ideas

Selma Karaaslan is making an attempt her hardest to maintain her two grandchildren secure.

The 52-year-old has been residing with them in a automobile parked alongside one of many debris-strewn roads of Kahramanmaras ever for the reason that quake struck.

Karaaslan tries to speak to them about something however the quake. She figures that they’re much much less prone to have haunting recollections of the catastrophe if she fills their heads with completely happy ideas.

However the questions nonetheless come.

“Grandma, will there be one other earthquake?” the six-year-old demanded at one level.

(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)