The 75-year-old woman had no contact with her son since the earthquake. (file)
Antakya, Turkey:
A Turkish soldier climbs into the bucket of an excavator to search an earthquake-damaged home in Antakya on Saturday for a cell phone belonging to a 75-year-old woman who feared her son had died after five days without contact had died.
The woman, who gave her name as Mama Busra, had asked aid workers to find her phone and was waiting for her son to be called at a nearby park where shelters for people left homeless by last week’s devastating earthquake Tents were put up.
In response to their plea, Murathan Adil, a special ops soldier who had flown from Ankara to the southern city to help with the rescue, was raised to a second-floor balcony of the remains of his building.
The earthquake’s destruction turned a narrow street into a cul-de-sac, the building’s basement had collapsed, its façade partially caved in, windows were shattered and cracks were exposed.
As Adil reached the balcony, another rescue worker handed him a red bag filled with Mama Busra’s belongings, including his phone, before the digger lowered him back down.
Pausing briefly to help dig bodies out onto a chariot from nearby buildings, Adil headed to the park where Mama Busra was waiting anxiously.
Before calling his son, the phone’s battery had died. But another person in the small building in the park heard her son’s name and said he knew him, and that he was alive and well.
The person dialed the son’s number on his phone. He replied – and Mama Basra burst into tears hearing her son’s voice for the first time since the earthquake five days ago.
“It’s like you gave me the world,” Mama Basra said of the moment she heard her son’s voice.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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