Sending money is the best way to help right now, but Americans can also sponsor asylum seekers and visit areas once they’re rebuilt.
The Antakya I know is a cosmopolitan city in southern Turkey. Kurtuluş Caddesı, the city’s central avenue, is similar to streets in Los Angeles or Miami, lined with restaurants and palm trees, resonant with multiple languages. The city was devastated in Monday’s earthquake that rocked Turkey and Syria, killing more than 21,000 people. To now see the images of Antakya with its buildings and homes collapsed and its trees turned to wreckage is shocking, engendering a sense of despair and helplessness that is easy to give into. But there are ways to help.
I lived and worked in Antakya in 2014. My employer, a French humanitarian agency, operated across the border in Syria’s northern Idlib province, providing assisted walking devices and rehabilitation therapy to civilians who’d lost limbs in the Syrian war. For better or worse, that area is no stranger to disaster, and neither are the many humanitarian organizations that have been operating there for decades. Our role — as humans wanting to help in the face of unspeakable suffering — is to recognize that there are people and institutions on the ground with years of experience navigating similar emergencies, and to support them. The best way to do that now is to send money.
Well-intentioned efforts to collect and send more tangible items — like clothing, medical or camping equipment — is exorbitantly expensive because of shipping and handling costs. It’s also a logistical nightmare for aid organizations to get these goods to the right people in the right places. Having to load and unload literal tons of unmatched old clothes, having to drive them to and from ports and airfields — it’s exhausting, and frankly, completely unnecessary.
In our rush to help, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Turkey is an upper-middle income country and many of the affected areas are large, well-connected metropolitan centers.
