A relative of victims of the earthquake in Turkey that has lost 10 family members and is missing two more, has spoken of her anguish as she awaits news on the unfolding incident, Surrey Live reports. Kadriye Karakas, from Epsom, has been glued to the news for days as she hopes and prays for good news.
A man's voice has been heard calling out for help from beneath the rubble six days after the earthquake hit Adiyaman, with the TV cameras showing the wreckage of the building that Kadriye's cousin and seven-year-old son lived in. She says that she awakes at 4am every morning "almost like a built-in warning alarm", but with thousands of miles between her and her family, Kadriye feels helpless.
"They are showing the building my cousin and his seven-year-old son are in and they have heard a man’s voice right now. There is a team digging and I don’t know how to describe it. I feel quite far away but also really close.
“My brain is all focused on the people and it’s like a miracle. I feel 99% hopeless. It’s been days since the building was all crushed and if anything they will be dead already.
"It is a miracle that they just rescued someone from the building next to that building where there was an eight-year-old boy. I’m struggling to feel hope and I’m also feeling so afraid. I just hope that they are not going to die.”
One such miracle is that of the survival of Kadriye's cousin's wife and daughter, who were sleeping in another room on the fourth floor when the building began crumbling. They were luckily thrown out of the window due to the force of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, which ensured their survival.
Kadriye thinks her cousin and his son might have been trying to escape, with his laptop and mobile phone found by rescue teams "without a scratch on it" in the bedroom they were sleeping in. "If only they had stayed where they were they might be alive,” she says.
Kadriye also says that other relatives were due to fly back to the Turkish capital of Ankara the day before the earthquake struck, however their flight was luckily cancelled. Their son opted to make the journey by car, but they opted to stay.
“They don’t normally live in the city and they were going to go back but their flight was cancelled," the 42-year-old says. "Now they have died. He told them the car was empty but they said ‘it’s okay we have got a flight tomorrow’."
Another "if only" is another relative that had a green card planning to move to America from Turkey, but changed his mind. “I just feel their pain. It’s too much every day and it’s coming more and more and losing more people. In seven days, ten of my relatives have died.”
Kadriye adds that a relative in Turkey died because their phone does not ring. “There is no phone reception and I can’t reach anyone, so if the phone is ringing it means they are alive.”
Subscribe here for the latest news where you live
The horrendous death toll has now passed 48,000. With hospitals crammed full, one of Kadriye's young cousins, Bilal, who survived the earthquake, picked up the bodies of his dead relatives for burial. Bilal was Kadriye’s encouragement to “just try and do something” to help, as she is now fundraising so her family “has something”.
She poignantly writes on her fundraising page: “Many of my cousins and their children have not survived, and those that have survived have lost everything, with their homes completely destroyed and turned to rubble.”
Kadriye emotionally said: "I want to do something for him and other families. I want to be useful. It’s easy to lay down, close your eyes and turn off the TV and pretend everything is okay."
For more stories from where you live, visit InYourArea.
