Running For Earthquake Relief

All of us in Turkey are still devastated by the major earthquakes that laid waste to vast swaths of the country's southeast on 6 February this year, killing more than 50,000 people. Across the 10 affected provinces, more than 200,000 buildings have been destroyed or badly damaged; millions of people are displaced.

The road ahead is a long and difficult one for the survivors. Many independent Turkish NGOs are doing incredible work assisting with immediate needs and longer-term recovery but they are in dire need of resources and support.

I'm running the Istanbul Half Marathon on 30 April along with other members of my Istanbul Expat Runners team to raise money for the Turkey Mozaik Foundation's Kahramanmaras Earthquake Emergency Relief Fund.

Founded by expat Turks living in the UK, the Turkey Mozaik Foundation is a registered, reliable charity that directs your donations to vetted Turkish civil society organizations as grants to carry out specific projects in the earthquake zone, from delivering emergency food packages and setting up clean-water infrastructure to providing psychosocial support and establishing safe spaces for women and children.

🔈 DONATE NOW 

Thank you for contributing to this effort through your donations and shares 💜

Solidarity = love

A truck full of aid ready to head 

to the earthquake zone

It's been just over a week since earthquakes ravaged southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria, and 'unbearable' is the word that keeps coming up as we try to process each day's horrors. More than 35,000 people (and counting) are now dead in Turkey, over 5,000 people dead in Syria, and vast swaths of cities have been destroyed, leaving millions displaced in frigid weather. Everyone I speak to has been touched by this disaster, everyone knows someone who is gone forever or has lost everything. 

Through their pain, Istanbul and other cities around the country have rallied in an incredible way. Municipal buildings, restaurants, homes, galleries, and gyms were converted into collection points and filled with volunteers and donated goods. Film-crew trucks, moving vans, planes, and ferries were loaded up with deliveries of aid - winter clothes, food, water, diapers, medical supplies, tools, generators, sleeping bags, tents - purchased by individual citizens, governments, and companies alike. Shopkeepers helped box up donations and carry them out to cars, offered discounted prices, or threw in extra goods for free. The mobilization was stunning. It still felt excruciatingly insufficient. 

My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who has given their money, time, or other resources in any way. To those who sent cash directly to me to be spent in Istanbul, I thank you for your trust as well. These funds bought blankets, warm hats, flashlights, batteries, underwear, sanitation supplies, grocery cards, medical supplies, three sturdy family-size tents (two with stoves), and tools for search and rescue teams, went to a fund to purchase container homes for doctors volunteering in the earthquake zone, and offered a bit of direct support to families left penniless.

The need is huge, and will continue to be for a long time, both for humanitarian assistance and longer-term rebuilding. Civil society in Turkey is brave and determined, but needs support. I urge anyone who can to give – now, later, regularly if you're able – to any of the local NGOs listed in my "how to help" post.

How to help after devastating earthquake in SE Turkey and Syria

[Updated 14 February]

We woke up Monday morning in Istanbul to devastating news from southeast Turkey and Syria, where a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and dozens of aftershocks overnight have now left more than 30,000 people dead in Turkey and an additional 3,000 in Syria, with tens of thousands injured and the death tolls still expected to rise further. Thousands of buildings have been destroyed or damaged, included historical structures. Here’s some reliable ways you can help:

Donate money to NGOs working on the ground in Turkey:

(** links are best bets for donating from outside Turkey/with international credit cards. For reference, 500 TL = 26.50 USD / 25 EUR / 22 GBP / 35.50 CAD)

** Donate to the esteemed Turkish volunteer search and rescue organization AKUT (Türkçe'de bağışlar: https://www.akut.org.tr/bagis-yap)

** Donate to reliable civil society groups that are providing immediate relief and medium- to long-term recovery to survivors via UK-based Turkey Mozaik Foundation or US-based Turkish Philanthropy Funds (100% of donations go to recovery efforts in both cases).

Donate to the Istanbul Medical Chamber to buy medical supplies and containers for doctors to stay in while volunteering the earthquake zones. They are sending regular convoys of volunteer and supplies by car from Istanbul.

** Donate to the volunteer response being carried out in Turkey by the trusted, independent NGOs İhtiyaç Haritası (Needs Map) or Ahbap. 

** Donate to Hayata Destek (Support to Life), a Turkish NGO experienced in providing humanitarian relief and working with underserved communities. 

** Donate to the Lubunya Deprem Dayanışması solidarity fund to help LGBTQ+ people impacted by the earthquakes, or to the Aman Project specifically to help affected LGBTQ+ refugees. (Depremden etkilenmiş ve destek ihtiyaç olan LGBTQ+ kişiler yardım başvurusu yapabilir burada.)

Donate to efforts to help animals in the disaster zone coordinated by Dört Ayaklı Şehir (Four-Legged City), an organization recommended by a good friend of mine who is active with animal rights in Turkey. A Turkish vet friend recommends the Work Animals Rescue Foundation, which is doing similar work helping farm animals, street animals, and pets.

Donate goods in Turkey:

Donate NEW winter clothes/shoes, blankets, sleeping bags, diapers, baby formula, food parcels, hygiene supplies, heaters, generators, etc. at collection points set up by local/district/city officials. Check their social media accounts for the latest needs before buying/delivering: 

• Cihangir Semt Konağı (inside the İspark garage below Cihangir Park, upstairs next to the health center) 
• İBB Logistic Centers in Yenikapı and Kartal (call ALO 153 for details) - OPEN 24/7
• Kadıköy Belediyesi Başkanlığı building (Fahrettin Kerim Gökay Cd. No:2 in Hasanpaşa)
• Şişli Belediyesi Başkanlığı building (Darülaceze Cd. No:8 in Şişli Merkez) - OPEN 24/7

A full list of official collection points for earthquake aid in each Istanbul district has been posted on Instagram by Turkish Dictionary.

Buy tents, hygiene packs, coats, boots, blankets, sleeping bags, food packages, etc. online to be sent to the quake areas with İzmir municipality teams (try Firefox browser instead of Chrome).

Volunteer in Turkey:

Donate blood at Kızılay sites around Turkey: https://www.kanver.org

Multiple NGOs operating under the Afet Platformu umbrella are coordinating volunteer efforts for humanitarian relief in affected cities. If you speak Turkish and are willing to volunteer, fill out this form: https://form.jotform.com/230361452031037 

You can also sign up for Afet Platformu's donor pool and get updates on the latest needs.

Have an empty home/apartment you're willing to open up to a displaced family? Want to provide rent support to displaced people? Know someone who lost their home and needs somewhere to live? Apply to the Bir Kira Bir Yuva (One Rent, One Home) website set up by the İzmir Metropolitan Municipality and the charity İhtiyaç Haritası (Needs Map).

Thousands of refugees live in the affected parts of Turkey. If you can speak Persian or Arabic and want to help, contact the Göçmen Sendikası Girişimi.

If you speak multiple languages and are willing to work with or volunteer for international rescue and relief team or media organizations, you can sign up to this directory created by the Foreign Media Association in Turkey.

Donate to rescue and relief efforts in Syria:

** To support rescue and recovery efforts in Syria, donate to the White Helmets, the Syrian American Medical Society, Molham Team, the Syrian Child Protection Network (Hurras), Choose Love or Basmeh Zeitooneh (the latter two are also working in Turkey).

** Support the engineers at Field Ready Türkiye (Sahaya Hazır İnovasyon Derneği) who work in Gaziantep, Turkey, and northwest Syria. Among other things, they make cheap, low-tech airbags for search and rescue from buildings which have collapsed. "If we move fast they can make more," a good friend who previously worked with the team writes. "The workshops in Syria also have vast experience of fixing essential medical equipment, and making insulated shelters - both greatly needed right now."

Spread (good) information:

If you know people in the affected cities who have been left without shelter, some hotels and other accommodation facilities are offering free places to stay for earthquake victims. And here's a map of other places offering shelter and support.

Add locations of collapsed and heavily damaged buildings to this GIS map so teams can reach them more quickly.

Be careful about sharing information if you don't know the source; check with Teyit or Doğruluk Payı – both members of the International Fact-Checking Network – to see if claims on social media have been verified.

This post is a work-in-progress, I’ll be updating it as I can.

Ordinary encounters I won't forget

"Çekme! Çekme!" Though I couldn't see the source of the voice as I squinted into the low sun, which had been setting ever so beautifully on one of Ayvalık's old cobblestone streets, the message was clear: Don't take that picture. I lowered my camera. "Çekmiyorum," I called back. I'm not shooting. Afraid of what faux pas I might have committed or what awkward situation I might have stumbled into, I approached the woman who had called out to me. She wasn't angry at all.

"I just look so ugly in my house clothes, I didn't want you to take my picture," she explained (in Turkish), laughing. The heat of the early summer day still hung on the street and like many other residents of the old part of town, this thirtyish woman was sitting on her stoop to stay cool, chatting with people as they passed by. She invited me to sit and I spent the next two hours or so amidst the ongoing neighborhood conversation, meeting her teenage son as he sped by on his bike, answering curious onlookers' questions about where I was from, getting tips on which beach to go to, sipping juice, and finally joining my new acquaintance and her equally friendly daughter and mother (pictured) in the courtyard of their home, talking about the differences between Turkish and American culture.


I recalled this experience from my first summer in Turkey this past weekend, while taking another trip to the relaxing seaside town. No matter how frustrated I get with my halting progress in Turkish, chance encounters like these remind me of how glad I am to be making an effort to learn the language, something that has served me especially well -- in terms of both practical and entertainment value -- on trips out of Istanbul, where the people I meet seem ever interested in chatting with the foreigner who has somehow not found herself in Cappadocia or at a Mediterranean resort. If not for Turkish lessons, after all, I never would have been able to joke with the bored attendant at Saklıkent Gorge about his time working in Bodrum, where all the middle-aged female tourists seem to be on the prowl for young men. Nor would I have been part of the gem of a conversation my friend Matt and I found ourselves engaged in last year at Göbekli Tepe, an archaeological site outside of Şanlıurfa.

I don't remember how it happened, but somehow one of the guys showing us around decided we would be a good audience for his conspiracy theories about how Israel is trying to take over Southeast Turkey. Which is rich in, uh, watermelons and pigeons? Trying not to get too engaged in this one, we demurred, saying a few wishy-washy things about how there are good and bad people in every country, etc. etc. When he started asking about our family's religious backgrounds, I thought we'd be in for more of a tirade. But instead he seemed delighted, summing up the encounter as if he had discovered the secret to global peace: "Look at us, me a Muslim, you a Jew, and you a Christian -- all together! If only the whole world could be like this."

NOTE: People make the place, wherever you go. Check out other Lonely Planet travel bloggers' encounters around the world with interesting locals -- from teenage village girls to famous astronauts -- in the Blogsherpa Blog Carnival: Travel Encounters, hosted by Camden Luxford of The Brink of Something Else.

What didn't stay in Mardin

After pointing out the wall crypts, the sun-worshipers' chamber, and the "angel" carvings, the two boys who had appointed themselves our tour guides to the necropolis complex in the ancient Roman city of Dara wrapped up their patter: "Bitti. Başka kalmadı." That's it. The rest didn't stay. Now how about some lira?

Kids seemed to be on the hustle everywhere we went in the Southeast, whether waiting outside each of Dara's sites to follow us through the ruins or tailing us down Diyarbakır's back streets calling out, "Hello, hello, money, money!" It seemed especially pronounced due to the notable lack of adult "buyuruncus," the where-are-you-from-would-you-like-buy-a-carpet-I-have-very-nice-terrace bane of my every trip to Sultanahmet. Perhaps the most persistent was the boy who cornered us outside the Kırklar Kilisesi in Mardin, insisting that we come try some "very nice" wine. ("How would you know?" we asked, seeing as he was all of about 8 years old. He didn't seem to get the joke.) Having been warned about the unfortunately poor quality of this ev şarapı, we still decided -- correctly -- that a family of Christians who make wine in their house were worth meeting.

After begging off buying a bottle with many gracious teşekkür ederiz and empty promises to return after we finished our walking around for the day, we dined at possibly the only real restaurant in town, the much-recommended Cercis Murat Konağı, where the waiters only sniffed slightly at a pair of grubby backpackers settling into a table in an old Mardin mansion with a spectacular view across the desert toward Syria. The house wine there was amazingly good (keep in mind, our standards are low after so much time in Turkey) and the food tasty and different as promised -- what we could get of it, that is. For whatever reason, a good two-thirds of the items on the long, mouth-watering menu were "yok." (Unavailable.) We joked that at least they weren't "kalmadı," to our (North) American ears a strangely passive way of saying "we ran out of that." And then, yep, one of the main dishes we ordered... kalmadı.

We lingered as long as we could at dinner, trying to avoid going back to our ghetto hotel, with its windowless room and dirty squat toilet. Fortunately, a diversion presented itself on the walk back, a musical performance in the town's central çay bahçesi (tea garden). The over-sexualized 8-year-old belly dancer was of course a highlight, but most memorable was the guy who walked up to the stage at (presumably) key moments in the music and threw stacks of napkins into the air above the band members' heads, letting the paper pile up like snowdrifts.

I suspect if anyone tried to buy napkins the next morning at any of the neighborhood stores, they would find that they had... kalmadı.

Taking tea in Urfa

Up until now, probably the strangest place I have ever found myself sipping a cup of tea was a dingy Uzbek roadside chaihana in almost literally the middle of nowhere, a place that looked like it hadn't seen any other customers for a couple of decades but had not one, but three Britney Spears posters hanging on the wall. Well, the pigeon coop in Urfa completely blew that one out of the water.

(Come to think of, the local tire yard wasn't bad either. We had a few nice glasses of çay there while waiting for a fan to be installed in a car.)

Urfa, in southeastern Turkey, is, perhaps uniquely in the country, a city of equal-opportunity head covering, where men and women alike don silk lavender scarves called Yamşah; a city where people adorn themselves with facial tattoos, where a motorcycle is not road-ready without a carpet covering its seat, and where pigeons wear bracelets and earrings. Oh, yes, and it's also the reputed birthplace of the prophet Abraham. But we were mostly there to see the pigeons.

Inside Urfa's old bazaar, where men and boys pound designs into sheets of copper, making gorgeous platters and kitschy souvenirs alike, the courtyard of the Gümrük Han is an airy oasis. Built in 1562, this old Ottoman caravanasari (a place where travelers -- and their camels -- could stop and rest) is shaded by sand-colored tenting wafting in the light breeze and full of men sitting on low kürsü stools drinking tea and playing tavla, or backgammon.

Some, though, choose to spend their leisure time in a slightly less atmospheric location -- a dark, tucked-away room filled with the sound of flapping wings and tiny clinking jewelry and the blended perfume of dust, smoke, and pigeon shit.

Occasionally a man would pick up a bird and examine it, but if anyone was actually buying or selling the pigeons, they were sure taking their time doing so, puffing on cigarettes, sipping their tea, and watching the room's feathered occupants skitter and strut about, just as naturally as Americans -- and, OK, practically everyone in the world now -- hang out at Starbucks.