One suffers from language difficulties, the other from an attention deficit disorder. Their little brother died in the earthquake that devastated southeastern Turkey, and a year later their mother, Cansu Gol, is trying to help them overcome the trauma.
For the 33-year-old mother, the improvised container schools in Kahramanmaras, the province at the epicenter of the February 6, 2023 earthquake that killed more than 53,500 people, are a lifeline.
“My seven-year-old daughter was pulled alive from the rubble a few hours after the earthquake. She suffers from attention deficit disorder,” she confessed to AFP. “She hasn’t cried or screamed once, but she keeps all the stress to herself.”
Her four-and-a-half-year-old son began speaking again when she was able to take him to a daycare center set up in one of the containers still housing 700,000 victims, survivors of the worst disaster in Turkey's modern history.
“He constantly asks questions about his brother. He says he flew away like a bird,” his mother whispers.
“Painful”
Teachers are doing their best to provide a sense of normality to children who have all lost homes, friends or loved ones and don't always understand what happened.
Children receive their school certificates at a container-housed school in Kahramanmaras, January 19, 2024. AFP
In the courtyard, like in every other school in the country, there is a bust of the founder of post-Ottoman Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In each class of twenty students, balloons add a little color to the warehouse, which consists of hundreds of identical white metal containers lined up in equal rows.
But a ten-minute walk away, empty esplanades remind us that this city, famous in Turkey for its ice cream, was once home to residential towers.
“It is as painful for the students as it is for the teachers,” the school principal told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity because of his status as an official.
“Many things remind us of the earthquake: the aftershocks (more than 74,200 in one year, editor's note), the month of February or simply the snowfall” – abundant on the night of the disaster, he explains.
His school takes in 850 children from diverse backgrounds who now live in a container city of 10,000 survivors, where tensions between neighbors sometimes erupt into violence.
“Insults, insulting gestures, kicks: as long as these families are not housed in apartments, nothing will work,” believes the director.
“Resigned to return”
For him, the state, which has promised to build 500 schools to earthquake-proof standards in the earthquake-affected provinces, is doing everything it can.
Even teachers live in containers, in contact with students, he emphasizes: “After what catastrophe would everything be perfect?” Life must go on,” he says.
Kadiye Zarac, 71, a housewife, poses with her son in front of a row of housing containers where they live after the February 2023 earthquake, in Antakya, Hatay province, January 12, 2024. AFP
Elif Yavuz and her husband first tried to build a new life in another city, Mersin on the southern coast, like more than three million survivors who left their home provinces after the earthquake.
But like many others, the couple eventually split up because their seven-year-old daughter, who suffers from heart problems, was having difficulty adjusting.
“I resigned myself to going back and living in a container just so she wouldn’t get lost,” the mother says.
Her daughter is doing well in school and Elif plans to buy her a new pair of shoes as a reward for her excellent report card.