Care & Share
İrem and I discovered a common interest in dancing music and poetry, and from then on, 16 years ago in secondary school, we decided to perform on stage together every week. We would rehearse at each other’s houses several times a week and on the occasions we practised at her house, she would meet me at the traffic lights near her house. We worked on our performances in her living room, which also contained a big library. And we would we take a break from rehearsing when her mother called from the kitchen, inviting us to come and enjoy the delicious pastries she baked. Her father, Mr Çakal, was a journalist and he taught us how to read poems fluently when he arrived home from work in the evening. Her older brother had a school desk in his room and when he was out, we used to read the love letters he hid in it. Reading aloud the enamoured words he shared with his young girlfriend felt much more like real poetry than the texts we were asked to read on stage at school.
Our friendship grew and we worked hard at school, motivating each other to get good grades. Either she or I would often get the highest grades in the school and eventually a sense of competition began to creep into our friendship. We were only 15 at the time and too young to realise that our school grades were not as important as our friendship. When it was time to go to high school, we parted company and had very little contact in the years that followed.
Around 10 years ago, I happened to be in the neighbourhood of her father’s office. The crazy university rush we all go through at the end of high school in Turkey had just ended and I decided to drop in and tell her father how proud I was to have achieved high grades and been accepted to university. I walked into his office and met his secretary. I told her that I had been the best friend of Mr Çakal's daughter at school and that I wanted to say hello. She asked me to leave though, explaining that he had lost İrem and his wife in an earthquake on the 17th of August the previous year. She said that he would be back at the office soon and that the sight of me might upset him. She also said that shortly after her death, Irem’s father had received a letter stating that Irem had been accepted to study law at university.
I took a taxi straight home. I started to hear and see her in my mind. I was too young to be able to deal with news like that, I guess. I kept seeing her wake up in the night to the sound of the earth moving, animals and people screaming. I saw her bed and the floor under her feet shaking as she tried to walk. I saw how this made it impossible for her to escape and how the walls fell down and the roof fell in on her. This was the hell that greeted her at the age of just 17.
You might feel very small in this huge world when you can't deal with situations or aren't able to change things by yourself. Although they say that you are only limited by your imagination, sometimes you need help from others to believe in this. Back then, I couldn’t imagine how her father felt, having been left to deal with this reality.
Of course, you don't need to experience something like this to realise that you can help people – like how my friends worked around the clock to set up a donation application for television in just one day, how many other Dutch people raised over 600,000 euros in two days via this application, how families have expressed a willingness to adopt an Haitian child or how the radio and television stations teamed up last week to raise money for Haiti. Similarly, rescue teams from across the world came to aid of Turkey in the aftermath of the earthquake that took İrem on the 17th of August 1999.
On Saturday, the Haitian government decided to call off the rescue efforts in Haiti. Now isn't it our task to ensure that the people who survived the hell of this earthquake know that the world cares and is willing to help and that they can still believe in the future?