Somehow it feels even more shocking than a battlefield: the violence of natural disasters shatters even this cruel and warlike time with its unfair blows to silent domestic intimacy.
When the shudders and cracks began, people in Turkey and Syria were at home and going about their daily lives: innocent, asleep, or perhaps planning the next direction for their work, life, or love.
As the Mail reported yesterday, some did give birth, the most private and intimate of miracles: Hearts around the world trembled at the news of a newborn baby being dug out of the rubble in the Syrian city of Jindires on the Afrin River.
The little girl was alive, still connected to her dead mother by the umbilical cord. The woman, Afraa, will have gone through the usual pains and strains of childbirth and hoped for the best for her baby. Perhaps when she died she knew it was a daughter; perhaps she had a brief moment to rejoice in their arrival.
Pictured: A newborn baby, still tied to his mother by the umbilical cord and pulled alive from the rubble of a house in northern Syria after a deadly earthquake after a deadly earthquake, receives medical attention at a clinic in Afrin February 7, 2023
Video footage showed the moment the child was pulled from the wreck
Now she is one of thousands dead, but her nameless child will find warmth. She was discovered by Khalil al-Sawadi, her father’s cousin and a brother-in-law. Another cousin ran to a hospital through the suffocating dust with her in her arms while Khalil continued digging for others.
The bodies of the baby’s parents were laid out for burial at a neighbor’s house, along with four siblings and an aunt: prayers were said, dignity and grief respected.
Outside the search continued; In the besieged hospital, Dr. Maarouf about the baby’s bruises and hypothermia. She is a survivor. Your life must matter.
This family, like many others, had already been expelled from another town during the last years of fighting in this troubled region; the fact that a natural disaster then hits them in their new home is terribly cruel.
When we imagine personal disaster, bereavement, homelessness, or humiliation, our simpler lives make us all too quick to think that we are giving up the will to live.
But when reality strikes, people aren’t like that. They scrape resolutely at their survival. This child’s extended family wants her to live: In this harsh, poor region, they will do their best to ensure that she lives.
And we all need that robust evidence that where there is life there is hope. The thousands of deaths in this earthquake are deeply shocking, but it is human instinct to eagerly seek out stories from survivors, reach out to them mentally, and send them solid help in any way we can.
For us remotely, it can be difficult to find the right causes to help and keep the momentum going as the news cycle continues. It takes discipline and mindfulness. But it’s a good instinct: not only because we cringe and find helplessness painful, but because we owe a tribute to survivors as well as seekers and healers.
Perhaps parents are particularly touched to see this hunger, to affirm life: Every mother knows the intensity of this will to survive.
We mourn the loss of Afraa of Jindires, but we respect that she would have fought to save her other children and free whoever announced her arrival with such intense pain.
Afraa Abu Hadiya, the mother of the baby whose umbilical cord was still attached when rescued, was found dead. Pictured: Mourners in the city of Jinderis, Aleppo province, Syria, bury their family members who died in the earthquake
Greetings also to Hulya Yilmaz in southern Turkey who spent 29 hours trapped under rubble with her baby Ayse Vera and must have comforted and warmed the child even as she herself faced death.
We may recall the extraordinary story of the 2000 Mozambique floods and the birth of Rosita Mabuiango. She was born in a tree above the whirling stream – which had crocodiles in it, for heaven’s sake. Later, when interviewed as a teenager, Rosita said that didn’t make her special — “it was just a different way of being born.”
But we do know that it was both special and inevitable that her mother, Chirindza, did what she did: catch the baby in a loop of her sarong and survive without food or water for four days before the helicopters arrived.
Or we may remember Karin Svard in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a mother running toward her children who were playing in the shallows as the wave approached. “I was so focused. . . ‘ she said later. “I could see this wall of white coming towards me, and it was coming faster. I didn’t care. I looked at my children. I wanted to hold her and take care of her.”
The 37-year-old Swedish police officer was devoured and eventually washed up onto higher ground. Her three sons, husband and brother all survived.
Pictured: Destruction can be seen in Hatay, southern Turkey, where debris has fallen onto a soccer field
Mothers are heroic at times like this, but men too run toward children at the cost of their own lives, trying to save them with fierce determination, no matter what the cost.
In Turkey and Syria, too, many stubbornly and inexorably dig through the cold days and nights for their own families and those of their neighbors.
Another unforgettable image was that of a little girl, her confused face a tiny speck of hope amidst the rubble of bricks. A White Helmet rescuer smoothed her hair and gently dug around her with his other hand, saying her father was nearby.
We do not yet know whether she still has a mother, siblings or other family. But she is there. Her people and the world want her to be safe.
The increase in human kinship during disasters can be almost overwhelming. Recently, here in East Anglia, we have been commemorating the floods of January 1953, a storm surge that devastated the coast from Lincolnshire to Essex.
It was a small loss compared to that earthquake, but more than 300 people died and 40,000 were left homeless. One record describes the community’s remarkable rescue effort as “spontaneous mobilization.” While official action was slow, it was ordinary people who rushed to help save and save lives.
Pictured: Young Yigit cried as he was handed past a line of rescuers who smiled as they carried the boy to safety in Hatay, Turkey
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans’ poorest in 2005, the state was again slow to respond. But, as one observer wrote, thousands of people survived only because grandchildren, or aunts, or neighbors, or complete strangers, ministered to those in need all along the Gulf Coast, and because an armada of boat owners went to New Orleans to bring stranded people to safety. ‘
There is a strong will to help, whether it’s collecting clothing for refugees, making a donation, or asking governments to hurry up. It’s not just pity—often a sullen, useless emotion—it’s admiration.
We need to see heads rise, spirits revive. When I was transferred to Hamburg with my father as a teenager, we had a Polish-Jewish cleaning lady who one day during her coffee break told us her story. She had walked many miles alone through haunted central Europe, giving birth in a ditch, aided by passing men.
It wasn’t the only such story we heard from my mother’s Polish friends. But there was this hardworking, middle-aged woman 20 years later, remarried, proud of her mud-born son who had qualified as an engineer. She expressed no self-pity, only sorrow for those who did not survive.
I often think of her today when we speak too lightly of fragile emotional victimhood and “broken”. women are strong. people are strong.
When fate gives them a chance, they defy it and want to thrive. It is a privilege and an honor to give them this opportunity.