“The destruction you see here is worse than war,” Zeynep Koygulu Yesildag said, speaking from a make-shift greenhouse where her family now lives after two earthquakes destroyed her home in Yesilkoy, a village in Hatay province. “There is nothing here — no tents, no food, little water. But we have to go on.” 

When the first temblor with a 7.8 magnitude hit Turkey’s southeast in the early hours of Feb. 6, Yesildag was not at her home with her husband and three children but at the one-bedroom house of her bedridden mother. She could not get her mother out of the house by herself, and stayed inside as parts of the building collapsed. Eventually, she managed to leave the house, and with her husband's help they took her mother, in the late stages of cancer, to the greenhouse; they arrived there before the second quake hit at noon. Exposed to poor hygienic conditions, no medical care and no means to get to a hospital, Yesildag’s mother died a few days later. “She spend her last days under absolute horrendous conditions in the greenhouse,” Yesildag told Al-Monitor. 

A month after the quake, the mother of three is struggling to take care of her family; they decided to remain on their land rather than go to one of the tent towns. “We asked for tents but were told there were none. I walked for an hour yesterday to get some food packs,” she said. “I try to maintain a minimum hygiene standard — many diseases are going around, particularly affecting women. My sister-in-law is sick already.” 

In nearby Gaziantep, the largest of the 11 provinces ravaged by the killer earthquakes and hundreds of aftershocks, opposition deputy Aylin Nazliaka said that the situation in the tent towns was no better. “A quake victim in Adiyaman told me that she was only able to obtain a tent after 15 days,” Nazliaka, head of the women’s branch of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), told journalists in a March 8 press conference marking International Women's Day. “They are now two families in one tent with two beds, which means they have to take turns sleeping.”