‘Even when we go through experiences like this — earthquakes, wars or other challenges — the Lord is always with us. He never abandons us. He stayed in the tabernacle during that earthquake, saying, ‘I am here. I am with you.’’
60,000!
It’s a staggering number that’s hard to comprehend. But that’s how many people died in the earthquake that rocked southern Turkey and northern Syria this day last year, Feb. 6.
The time 4:17 a.m. is now engraved in the minds of Turks and Syrians. In the dead of night, people were catapulted out of their sleep when the Earth began to shake violently. As one survivor described to me, first his bed was pushed side to side, wall to wall, and then up and down towards the ceiling. But he was one of the lucky ones — he is alive.
We met Irfan in his small general shop in the city of İskenderun in southwest Turkey. “It took just one minute,” he told us. “I went straight to my wife and children, and we ran. We all thought we were going to die. We thought, ‘This is it; we’re going to die.’ Look at me now, I’m shaking.”
And sure enough he was.
As I stood in this little shop with our EWTN camera crew, I could see in this man’s eyes the terror that night had left in his memory. That terror took the lives of 11 of his cousins and relatives. He moves out from behind the shop counter and sits on the floor in front of us and curls up in a tight ball. “This is how my sister’s daughter was buried in the rubble for four days! The concrete collapsed on top of her, and she was stuck like this for four whole days.”
“Thank God she’s alive,” I said.
“Yes, but she had to have both her legs amputated.”
That hit me: the unimaginable pain that young girl must have felt for four days as her legs were completely crushed. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
As we traveled from one city to the next over the course of a few days, producing our report for EWTN News In Depth, we kept hearing stories like this over and over. When you hear the enormous numbers of those who died, and the many more left injured, it’s staggering; yet the numbers just don’t make sense in your head.
And when you have someone standing in front of you, recounting what happened to one of their loved ones, it makes it heart-wrenchingly real.
We were filming with the Catholic relief organization Malteser International, which has been working overtime to bring survivors blankets, food, hygiene packs and the other basic necessities that we take for granted. The staff drove our crew around and pointed out some of the worst-affected areas.
One of their workers had tears in her eyes as we filmed a pile of rubble where an apartment block once stood. She told us this was where her elderly parents lived. Her mother made it out before the building collapsed, but her father didn’t. When she arrived at the apartment in the middle of the night and met her mother standing on the street surrounded by throngs of other injured, crying, dazed and confused people, they frantically looked for her father. But all that was left of the building was a pile of crumbled concrete and metal. She told me that, for a few days after, at some points, they could hear her father crying out from deep under the rubble but could never reach him.
Eventually, the crying stopped. He was then found dead.
The sheer destruction and devastation that was inflicted on the people of this region is incomprehensible, and looking around a year later at the many towns and cities still in ruins, it’s hard to see how things will be rebuilt in the near future. It seems it will take years, and in a country with a struggling economy, the question of how they will fund all this reconstruction is one that is going to loom large.
Not to mention the questions of corruption and shortcuts in the building industry in Turkey: Why did so many buildings collapse to nothing, while others remained standing? They were all hit by the same earthquake. Emotions have been running high in the country as evidence emerges of construction companies having cut corners or ignored regulations. People want answers and they want justice.
So where is the hope?
I visited a camp near the border with Syria, where thousands of people are living in tents and prefabricated huts. Many of the people in these camps are actually refugees from Syria. One Muslim family welcomed me into their small hut. Four of them live in one small room, with just mattresses on the floor. Their 17-year-old daughter came in from school, telling me in Arabic, “I remember waking up to find the whole house shaking. I felt so much fear. I was terrified. It was after we got out that the building collapsed.” They had been living in that home in Turkey for 10 years, building a new life after fleeing the war in Syria. Now, this is their new nightmare.
Their mother leaned over to me, “How can we care for our children in this situation? They have to go outside and walk if they want to use the bathroom, sometimes at night in the dark and the cold. There are no services here. My 9-year-old boy wants to leave the camp. But what can I tell him?”
I turned back to her daughter and asked, “What keeps you going? What gives you hope?”
She paused and then said, “Hope gets crushed. After the earthquake, you’re not the same person as before.”
This is the same question I asked Father Antuan Ilgit, a Turkish Jesuit priest, as we stood in the middle of his church, or what was his church.
Now, Annunciation Cathedral is a pile of rubble, with just two of its four walls still standing. When the earthquake struck, Father Ilgit ran from his house and into the church; and looking up, instead of seeing the roof, he saw the sky.
“I climbed up on the rubble and looked out over my city,” he recalled.
He quickly turned his attention to the altar and was amazed to find a statue of Our Lady completely intact, as well as the tabernacle. Everything else had been destroyed.
“The first thing I saw was the statue of the Madonna, which was intact. With the help of the sisters, we immediately took it and then opened the tabernacle and took out the Blessed Sacrament.”
Within a few minutes, Father Ilgit was inundated with people, crying and howling, amid the horror.
“People started climbing over the rubble into what was left of the church. They were coming with blankets and whatever they could carry. They yelled at me, ‘Father, we have lost our homes!’ Everyone came — Christians and Muslims.”
I asked him what he thought the intact tabernacle symbolized.
“Hope,” he said.
“Even when we go through experiences like this — earthquakes, wars or other challenges — the Lord is always with us. He never abandons us. He stayed in the tabernacle during that earthquake, saying, ‘I am here. I am with you.’”
