When she was just 13, Dicle Hayat Dağdeviren’s life was upended. A massive, 7.8 magnitude earthquake flattened most of her small hometown of Adiyaman in southeastern Turkey. You certainly read about the earthquake in the news. It ravaged Turkey and Syria. It killed over 60,000 people across both countries. It was February, 2023.
Shielded by her father, the teenager, now 16, survived the earthquake, but it took the lives of her mother and brother. “We were a beautiful family, but it is just the two of us now,” Dağdeviren told The Persistent. “I also injured my legs. My legs have healed, but my emotional wounds will take longer,” she added.
In Adiyaman alone, over 8,000 were confirmed dead.
Crisis workers say the actual toll of the earthquake may be higher. “Last year, a whole year after the earthquake, they found another body while cleaning the debris of one of the collapsed buildings,” Dağdeviren told me, while taking me and another journalist on a tour of her beloved, beleaguered town.
Signs of the tragedy are visible all over the city of 300,000. Large mounds of rubble are piled up at the sides of the roads. Buildings that were partially destroyed by the earthquake stand precariously like a pack of cards, waiting to be fully demolished. New construction is happening fast, but not fast enough to replace the many homes destroyed. The air is filled with dust from the construction.
While the destruction has been awful for everyone, it is the women and girls of Adiyaman who remain the most affected. Women in this conservative town not only find their lives upended but are also forced to take on additional roles with the emotional and physical labor of keeping their families together. While men focused on rescue efforts and later on finding jobs, the responsibility of securing shelter—usually in makeshift metal containers—became a woman’s job, one city official observed.
At the same time, people like Dağdeviren have found themselves trying to re-capture some of their lives—anything—from before the destruction. For Dağdeviren it comes in the form of her piano.
Read full story on The Persistent
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