Tent Cities Going Up for Turkey’s Newly Homeless

It was moving day for Mahide Baksi, and the 41-year-old homemaker was a bundle of nervous energy, lining up bulging plastic bags, boxes and her caged blue parakeet. Finally, she could look forward to a home of her own--a white tent in a giant camp springing up at the edge of this earthquake-devastated city.

“I’m so happy,” she said Sunday, grabbing a pair of her daughter’s shoes wrapped in newspaper. “We’ll have a house--sort of.”

Baksi’s enthusiasm was understandable, considering what she had been calling home: a white plastic lawn chair set on a grassy downtown strip. She, her husband and two daughters had lived in the open since Tuesday’s earthquake, perhaps the country’s worst recorded natural disaster.

As the search for survivors winds down, Turkey is turning its attention to a nightmarish result of the disaster: the hundreds of thousands of newly homeless, like Baksi and her family.

Tent cities are being created along a 175-mile belt of earthquake-damaged terrain stretching east from Istanbul. Turkish authorities said Sunday that 26,000 tents had been sent to the quake zone and four ferries were being dispatched to locations along the Marmara Sea to help house the homeless. But such shelter is woefully inadequate. And it is unclear what will happen to the tent dwellers when the weather turns cold and rainy in fall.

Adapazari, about 80 miles east of Istanbul, offers a snapshot of the staggering task authorities face. Here, 70% of the housing was damaged by the quake. Nearly three-quarters of the 350,000 residents of the city and its outlying villages will have to find new homes, local officials say.

“The problem today is first and foremost housing and sanitary conditions,” said Idris Kurtkaya, a deputy governor of the local province.

Preparations were underway Sunday at the huge tent city near Adapazari to receive the homeless. The Red Crescent, Turkey’s version of the Red Cross, had set up 650 conical tents, turning an empty field into a sea of white tepees.

An additional 2,350 tents will be pitched today, said the camp’s director, Safak Izgi.

As he spoke, the camp resounded with the clank of Turkish soldiers hammering tent stakes and the rumble of trucks hauling portable toilets. Izgi said similar large camps were going up in two other earthquake-damaged cities, Golcuk and Izmit, the latter of which was at the epicenter.

“Our country may not be rich in money, but we are in heart,” said the camp director, pointing to a mountain of donated mattresses, blankets and tents.

With hot showers, clean drinking water and cooked meals, the camp offers a vast improvement over conditions for many of the homeless in Adapazari. But no one knows how long the earthquake victims will be forced to live in tents.

Izgi said he hopes the camp will be empty by November. But Kurtkaya acknowledged that it could be a year or more before new housing is ready for so many victims. The entire city might have to be rebuilt elsewhere, he said.

“Of course, it’s terribly hard to stay in tents in the wintertime. The state must act immediately to convert these extraordinary living conditions to normal living conditions,” Kurtkaya said.

On Sunday, the camp’s first residents were already worrying about health care. Among them was Senar Kilic, 26, who had carried his pregnant wife from their listing house during the quake and watched as, minutes after they escaped, a subsequent tremor sent the building crashing to the ground.

Kilic was relieved to be alive and at the camp. But his wife is due to have her baby in nine days.

“There’s no place for pregnant women to give birth,” he fretted.

Kilic had been spending the days since the quake dwelling on his anxieties: His job vanished when the temblor destroyed the kebab restaurant where he cooked. His sister was buried in the rubble. He lost all his possessions. Even the gray slacks and white T-shirt he wore were donated by a relief organization.

“I think about my future, my baby, my wife,” he said in nervous, staccato Turkish as an interpreter translated. “All my savings, my house, my furniture are gone. What am I going to do for my baby?”

Baksi, the homemaker who was moving to the camp, had different worries: her two teenage daughters.

“Where is the school? How are they going to go to school?” the mother asked as she filled a friend’s car with plastic bags of blankets and food that the family had received from relief agencies.

Still, she recognized that the camp would be a big step up over the motley collection of lawn chairs and a torn mattress where the family and their neighbors had spent the past few days. The family hadn’t bathed in five days, and Baksi had developed a red rash on her arms.

Many of the homeless remain in such dire conditions. Nezamat Ercebeci, 55, her elderly husband and son built a shelter from cardboard and wood in an Adapazari playground next to a three-story mountain of rubble that had been her apartment building.

“I’m a little bit angry” with the government for not providing more help, she said.

The homeless crisis could be far worse, however. Authorities said the majority of the victims had sought shelter with family or friends.

“Our family relations dictate that we help each other,” Izgi said.