The Earthquake Heartbreak
I’ve just finished watching the news from Greece broadcast on SBS. For the best part of an hour, images were transmitted of the human suffering, the countless lives lost, the children being pulled out from under the rubble – it is just heartbreaking.
A baby born under the rubble, pulled out by rescuers who then had to cut the umbilical cord that connected the baby to its now dead mother. A small child, clutching a lock of hear in its tiny fist, presumably from its mother (but nobody knows). A child brought out who immediately said: “but I’ve got school tomorrow!”. Another small child saved, asking for his sister who was “sleeping” next to him but would not wake up – yes, she was dead. A small girl, pulled out unconscious who came to in the hospital crying for her parents; she doesn’t know that they are dead. A father, crying inconsolably and apologising to his wife because he was unable to save any of their children. People lining up, carrying the bodies of their loved ones, to get paperwork to allow them to be buried in what are essentially mass graves, laid to rest with a simple prayer because of course there is no way that the Immams can get to even a small percentage of the burials.
Nobody, and I mean nobody could see those images and not choke up. And that’s not even considering the hundreds of thousands, likely to be millions, who have been left homeless in the freezing conditions, without food or safe water.
The death toll across both Turkey and Syria has officially exceeded 20,000 people. It is almost certain that this number is a gross underestimation; many of the smaller towns and villages have not been visited yet, and the number of people missing is pretty much unknown. To give some idea of the scale of the disaster, the region devastated is larger than the land area of Greece and is densely populated with about twice the population of Greece.
Experts guesstimate that by the time we get a clearer picture the toll will be more like 50,000 dead.
And if that’s not bad enough, the WHO is warning that a secondary health crisis, brought on by diseases such as cholera because of the lack of sanitation and clean water, has the potential to cause even more deaths than the earthquakes.
This event is a disaster of biblical proportions. Please, if there is anything you can do, either individually or through any organisations you are associated with, do it, and do it now.
Let’s hope that long-standing conflicts in the region - Turkey vs Greece/Cyprus/EU, the Syrian civil war, can be set aside for a while as we try to deal with this humanitarian crisis. I am glad to see that both sides of politics, in Greece and in Cyprus, are adopting such a stance.
