Everyone wants to help!

The Vietnamese community in Istanbul is not left out. Through the Vietnamese Community in Türkiye group, we organized relief activities, mobilizing acquaintances and benefactors to contribute. Each person contributed a little effort and together we collected about 700-800 sets of winter clothes for children and many T-shirts for adults.

Unfortunately, all cities in Türkiye are currently experiencing cold weather, heavy snowfall, which has greatly affected the relief operations. The cold also reduces the endurance of those trapped under the rubble waiting for rescue forces to arrive.

The local government also quickly organized relief in a very professional manner, thanks to its infrastructure and good organization. In each district, there are several collection points, where the packages sent here are loaded onto waiting trucks and transported to the affected areas.

Local authorities called on people to limit personal activities on the streets to create clearance for relief traffic.

The extent of the earthquake damage is so great that rescue teams have not been able to reach all the affected areas. It is expected that it will take about 4-5 days for domestic and international search and rescue teams to reach all the areas in need of rescue.

Thư từ Thổ Nhĩ Kỳ: Ai cũng muốn chung tay hỗ trợ! - Ảnh 1.

Mr. Duong Nam Phuong (standing) and friends pack relief clothes for earthquake victims. Photo: PROVIDED BY CHARACTER

In the earthquake area, the majority of residents are locals and Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, Vietnamese people are mainly concentrated in major cities in western Türkiye.

The death toll was so high partly because the earthquake occurred early in the morning, when people were still sleeping and could not escape in time. If it had been during the day, the death toll might not have been so terrible.

Although the Turkish people have witnessed many earthquakes of magnitude 5 or 6, the earthquake earlier this week (magnitude 7.8) left everyone shocked and bewildered. Daily activities in other places continued as usual, but the general mood of everyone was that they could not concentrate on work and study, but only wanted to join hands to support the victims.

Everyone should spare some time to participate in volunteer activities. Really, no one has the mind to do anything when constantly witnessing images of many victims losing all their property, homes, and even all their family members.

During this time, the Vietnamese community's fundraising activities in Istanbul will continue as the aftermath of the earthquake continues and the search for survivors continues.

Rescuers continued to race to find more survivors on February 8 as the death toll from the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria rose to more than 11,200. Cold weather and aftershocks hampered rescue efforts. According to Reuters , the death toll in Turkey and Syria was more than 8,700 and 2,500 respectively.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan visited the town of Pazarcik, the epicenter of the quake, and the hardest-hit province of Hatay on February 8. Turkish authorities said about 13.5 million people were affected in an area stretching about 450 kilometers from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east. About 60,000 rescue workers are in the disaster zone but are unable to rescue trapped people fast enough.

Spring Mai

(*) The author has lived in Istanbul, Türkiye for 14 years and is one of the three administrators of the Facebook page of the Vietnamese Community in Türkiye.

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