Çağla Sağlam laughed as she gathered with family at her mother’s house. Someone started singing and everyone joined in. It was a picture-perfect moment that looking back now brings Çağla to tears. Because by the next morning, everything had changed forever.
“I woke up and the house had collapsed,” she recalls of the early moments following a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck her home country of Türkiye. “I lost my 21-year-old sister. My sister was pregnant. I lost my 51-year-old mother, and I lost my 33-year-old husband. I went to bed with all of them at night and in the morning, they were gone.”
"In the disaster of the century, I lost my loved ones, my life,"
Çağla Sağlam, earthquake survivor.
For the first three days after the earthquake, Çağla and her children stayed inside of a container truck with 20 other people, no food, no clean clothes, no formula for her then 11-month-old daughter. They sheltered in tents, but there was still no relief. Cagla didn’t know if she even wanted any. “I would never be happy,” she thought after losing her husband of nearly a decade.
“Our life was turned upside down,” she says. “It was hot inside the tent, we could not take a bath, the tap water did not flow. We couldn’t eat at all. There was filth everywhere.”
Your love brings hope to the hopeless.
In her time of the greatest despair, your love arrived. ̧Cağla and her children ̧now live in a container home, made possible by caring people like you. She has a kitchen, bath, a flushing toilet and air conditioning for the hot summers. She received food for her family and her children play with others in their community. There are even events for the kids, which she says helps them deal with the heartbreaking trauma they have experienced.
Life is still challenging for Çağla. On her refrigerator, she has photos of the family and loved ones she lost. She even saved the piece of cloth she used to wipe the blood from her husband’s forehead after she pulled him from their home. She keeps it in her wallet with her always.
“I took my husband out of the rubble and wiped his forehead,” she says. “That’s the only memory I have left. The memory of the blood flowing from his forehead. I live with it. I can’t get over it. It won’t go away.”
And while Çağla’s grief remains, she is focused on a brighter future for her children.
“I have a home again,” she says. “I can house our children in it. I just want to raise and educate my four children properly. I have no other ambitions in this world. Thank you very much for making my children happy. Thank you. I’m grateful. God bless you."
