A father rummages through quake rubble to find his daughters’ memories

ISLAHIYE, Gaziantep —  Abdi Dogan, 51, is rummaging by means of the rubble of his two-storeyed home in Islahiye, a small city in southeastern Türkiye. His daughters have very particular requests – one desires her flute, and one other is searching for her favorite hair dryer.

It has been almost three weeks since two earthquakes – measured at magnitude 7.8 and seven.6 – tore by means of the area, devastating cities and cities and killing nearly 50,000 folks in Türkiye and neighbouring Syria.

Dogan, his spouse and 4 daughters managed to flee earlier than it got here tumbling down like many of the buildings within the area, near the epicentre of the primary earthquake in Kahramanmaras.

The household shifted to Denizli, about 900 km from Islahiye, and are being put up with a member of the family. They usually are not certain what the long run holds for them.

“I came back from Denizli to rescue some of our memories,” Dogan tells TRT World. “My daughters asked me to collect some of their stuff, like a hair dryer and a bracelet, from our collapsed apartment. They told me, ‘father, please bring back those items so dear to us’.”

Of his 4 daughters, the second is married however stayed together with her sisters the evening the earthquakes struck. Dogan labored at a yarn manufacturing unit, which was additionally closely broken and knocked out of service by the temblors.

The home, constructed by Dogan’s father 20 years in the past, holds numerous recollections for the household of six.

“When I take their items back to them, they can recall our old days, refresh their memories. So that would be a good feeling for them,” Dogan says.

He says that his third daughter, 18-year-old Havva Naz, was adamant that he search for and produce again her hair dryer and hair straightener.

“Havva Naz told me, ‘I don’t want to get a new hairdryer. Our old hair dryer is better than any new one’,” Dogan recollects.

“She has curly hair. I told her, you look better this way, so you don’t need a hair straightener. But she insisted that she wants straight hair,” he says. “It’s life. Some want curly hair while others like straight hair, like my daughter.”

Among the gadgets Dogan managed to retrieve from the rubble included Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a e-book of tales by Turkish author Omer Seyfettin, and a duplicate of the Quran.

And he continues to search out new gadgets within the particles.

“This is my younger kid’s homework,” he says, displaying a mannequin of an iron bicycle made by the eight-year-old. “She always got good grades, producing nice models at her technology design class,” he says, holding the iron bicycle, whilst an excavator demolished a broken home throughout the road. 

But Dogan says he’ll return to Denizli after accumulating all of the usable gadgets. He should discover a new job. Rebuild his life. Marry off his three daughters. The eldest, 24, is a trainer and contributes to the household’s earnings.

Dogan’s predicament displays the collective ache of loss and struggling of hundreds who survived the pure catastrophe however have been left to deal with the trauma of shedding relations aside from their properties and hearths.

Dogan himself misplaced one among his brothers-in-law and his children in Islahiye. Some of his relations additionally misplaced their lives in Kahramanmaras in addition to Nurdagi, a district within the southeastern province of Gaziantep. And he was there in Nurdagi, retrieving our bodies of relations from the rubble.

Dogan’s automobile, parked within the household home’s storage within the basement, was additionally buried beneath the rubble. On Friday morning, he was attempting to take away his automobile from the particles.

Dogan says the place the place the home stood is sacred to him. After cleansing the particles, he desires to construct a small home on the identical plot.

“I have memories of this place. As my daughter insists on keeping his hair dryer’s memories intact, how can I easily give up this place?” he asks. “I have trees,” he says, pointing to olive and poplar bushes in his backyard.

Source: TRT World