Volunteers From Abroad Alleviate Turks’ Torment

Safak Izgi was distributing food in Kosovo when his cellular phone rang with an urgent request: Could the veteran Turkish aid worker fly to his homeland to help earthquake victims? Within hours, Izgi was on a plane--not even taking a change of clothes.

“I came like this. I have no suitcase,” Izgi said Tuesday, gesturing toward the blue tank top and jeans he had been wearing since arriving three days earlier from Yugoslavia.

“I was in Kosovo helping refugees. Now I’m a refugee myself.”

In the wake of the Aug. 17 quake, thousands of relief and rescue workers dashed to Turkey, abandoning families, jobs and clean socks. Some are members of well-paid government teams; others are idealistic amateurs such as the tiny Mexican known simply as “The Flea,” a hero of the 1985 earthquake in his country.

In Turkey, a nation with an undeveloped civil-defense system, these volunteers have been the backbone of humanitarian efforts. Their stories offer the few bright spots in a grim panorama of shattered lives.

Izgi is running a tent city for 15,000 at the edge of Adapazari, about 80 miles east of Istanbul. While he has worked for 12 years with the Red Crescent--the Islamic version of the Red Cross--he acknowledges that this is a seat-of-the-pants operation.

“I have nothing, just this notebook. My laptop is there,” he said, gesturing in the vague direction of Eastern Europe. “I plan in my head.”

When the Red Crescent called Izgi to help earthquake victims, he raced to the airport, not even returning to his temporary home at a refugee camp in Macedonia for a suitcase. His clothes were sent to him Monday, but they were dirty. So on Tuesday, he was wearing black plastic bags for socks.

“We have a saying: People who work in the Red Crescent have no money and their wives are widows. I accept this,” he said laughingly. “I am 43 years old, but I can’t get married. There are so many problems in the world.”

Izgi has no idea when he’ll get home to Ankara, the Turkish capital, which he left in June. Nor does he spend much time thinking about it.

“This is what I do,” he said simply.

What Harry Oakes does is find the missing. The American rescue expert normally charges $150 an hour to recover missing people and pets. Those he has saved range from plane crash victims to Jimmy Durante’s cat.

But he flew to Turkey at his own expense to participate in the rescue operation.

“I just took the money out of my savings. I figure I can’t take it with me,” said the rescuer, dressed in a red jumpsuit, as he fed scraps of bacon to his small black sniffer dog, Valerie, at an Istanbul hotel Monday.

Oakes was proud to have helped in the rescue of two people after he arrived Saturday. But he worried that the Turkish government had been urging an end to search operations since the weekend. Authorities were planning to start bulldozing wreckage and removing dead bodies.

“We know people are still alive,” he complained.

The Portland, Ore., resident characterized the rescue operation as far more chaotic than those he had joined after such U.S. disasters as the 1994 Northridge quake. Turkish government rescue workers were nearly absent, he said. But he was impressed by ordinary Turks who desperately tried to unearth survivors.

Professional rescue teams from as far away as South Korea and Malaysia have helped search for survivors of the quake in recent days, many using sophisticated cameras and instruments.

At the other extreme is the Mexican peasant known as La Pulga--The Flea.

Marcos Efren Zarinana was a street peddler and Seventh-day Adventist minister who gained fame in 1985 by helping rescue more than two dozen people after the earthquake that hit Mexico City.

The 5-foot, 105-pound volunteer arrived Saturday on a ticket from British Airways, equipped with only a tool-laden backpack and an uncanny ability to shimmy into small spaces.

“In Mexico, I saw the desperation of children seeing their mother or father trapped in the rubble, and the desperation of a father seeing his wife and children unable to escape,” recalled the 57-year-old volunteer. “I cannot bear this suffering.”

Although he is so poor he doesn’t own a telephone, La Pulga has flown to disaster sites ranging from Acapulco to the Colombian city of Armenia, paying his way with donations.

But for all his eagerness to help, he ran into a wall in Turkey.

He arrived as the government was winding down the rescue operation. His appeal to work with a Miami rescue team was politely rebuffed by the Americans, who were unsure of his expertise.

“How can you take on that liability?” asked Giovanni Ulloa of the U.S. team.

On Sunday, La Pulga drove from city to city, encountering abandoned ruins of buildings and rescue workers packing their bags or expressing bewilderment about what to do with a pickax-toting Mexican peasant.

Dejected, La Pulga was preparing to fly home today.

“With the lack of coordination, the bureaucracy and the opposition of the government [to continued digging], the survivors will not hold out,” he said.

But his enthusiasm for rescue work was undimmed. He vowed to carry on his mission in other places.

“Someone asked when I’ll leave this. I said, ‘When I can no longer carry my backpack,’ ” La Pulga said.