Durban - At least 100 volunteers from the Gift of the Givers team who assisted earthquake victims in Türkiye and Syria touched down in Johannesburg and Cape Town over the weekend.
Gift of the Givers founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman said it was an “incredibly emotional” mission as teams were continuously confronted by survivors calling out for help with the hope that their loved ones were still alive under the rubble.
“All of them want you to come and dig in their building, and everybody waits with hope, with pain, with longing in their eyes, pleading, please can you come,” he said.
Sooliman said their volunteers were divided into three teams and worked with teams from China, Türkiye and Oman after requests to pair with them.
In total there were 11 international teams, including one from the Turkish government, while the Gift of the Givers team was the only NGO in Hatay, the site of the most severe damage and loss of life in Türkiye. They were also the only team with five dogs who were hailed as heroes by South Africans for their sterling work.
Sooliman said the city of Hatay was a vast area and that the various search and rescue teams could not reach every corner of Hatay because of its size and because there wasn’t enough manpower and the destruction was too huge.
“There was no shift work, they just pulled long hours,” he said.
Gift of the Givers also managed to pull an 80-year old woman from the rubble, thanks to members of the canine unit, he said.
Although there were many success stories, many tragic ones also continued to emerge after the earthquakes.
Gift of the Givers left Hatay on Thursday and went to Ankara where the team was hosted by the South African government before making the long trek to Istanbul from where they scheduled to fly home.
However, their mission in Syria would continue where they had a huge operation including two hospitals, feeding programmes, search and rescue teams and had been working there for the past 11 years.
Sooliman said all their members were continuously debriefed and provision was also made for secondary trauma counselling once they returned home.
He said the team was accustomed to working in such conditions as most of them had been on several of the other missions they had participated in.
He said the team had assisted survivors in Iran in 2003 and Pakistan in 2005. They had sent their first search and rescue team to Haiti in 2010, They had also been to the Philippines to assist typhoon victims and had helped out during disasters in Indonesia and Nepal.
The Xinhua News Agency yesterday reported that seven people who survived the powerful earthquakes on February 6 were killed in a fire that hit the house in Türkiye's central city of Konya where they were sheltering, local media reported
The victims were all from a Syrian family who had moved to Türkiye to be with their relatives after the massive earthquakes. The parents and five children of the Syrian family were killed in that fire. According to reports, a witness said the fire was possibly caused by the electric heater or stove during the night.
Local media reported that millions of Syrian refugees currently lived in Türkiye after a civil war broke started in their country in 2011. Most of the Syrians in Türkiye live in poverty and the earthquakes have added to their suffering.’
Its estimated that at least 38 000 people died in southern Türkiye and Syria in the twin earthquakes.
Reuters reported that Mosques around the world yesterday performed absentee funeral prayers for the dead in Türkiye and Syria as many of them couldn’t receive full burial rites given the enormity of the disaster.
Last Thursday, 11 days after the earthquakes, two more survivors were pulled out of the rubble. The two, aged 14 and 34 years, were both rescued in Antakya in Türkiye’s south-east.
“I had completely lost all hope. This is a true miracle. They gave me my son back. I saw the wreckage and I thought nobody could be saved alive from there,” the boy’s father said.
Football’s governing body Fifa allocated $1 million (R18.2m) to provide humanitarian aid. Ghanaian footballer Christian Atsu is still missing in Türkiye. He was scheduled to fly out of the country hours before the earthquake, but his team manager said the Ghanaian decided to stay after scoring a winning goal in a match the day before.
“He was caught in an earthquake on his happiest day. This is literally a tragedy,” Fatih Ilek said.
The Independent on Saturday