The injured children at Adana City Hospital are too young to know how much they have lost.
I watched as doctors in the intensive care unit bottle-fed an injured six-month-old girl whose parents were not found.
There are still hundreds of cases of unaccounted for children whose parents are dead or unknown.
The earthquake destroyed their homes and now took their names.
Dr. Nursa Keskin holds the hand of a girl in the intensive care unit, known only by the tag on the bed: “Anonymous.”
She has multiple fractures, a bruise on her eye and severe bruising to her face; but she turns and smiles at us.
“We know where she was found and how she got here. But we are trying to find the address. The search continues,” says Dr. Keskin, pediatrician and deputy director of the hospital.
Many of these cases are children rescued from collapsed buildings in other regions. They were brought to Adana because the hospital is still standing.
Many other medical centers in the disaster area have collapsed or been damaged. Adana became the center of salvation.
In one of the transports, newborn children were urgently brought here from the maternity ward of the heavily damaged hospital in the city of Iskenderun.
Turkish health officials say there are currently more than 260 injured children in the country’s disaster zone who they cannot identify.
This number may increase significantly when more areas are covered and the extent of homelessness is fully revealed.
I follow Dr. Keskin through the crowded corridors. Those who survived the earthquake are lying on trolleys, others are wrapped in blankets on mattresses in the emergency zone. We head to the surgical ward, also full of injured children.
We meet a girl who the doctors say is five or six years old. She is asleep and on IVs. Officers say she has a head injury and multiple fractures.
I ask if she was able to tell them her name.
“No, it’s just eye contact and gestures,” says Dr. Ilknur Banlisur, a pediatric surgeon.
“Because of the shock, these children cannot really speak. They know their names. When they stabilize in a couple of days, we can [спробувати] to talk,” she explains.
Health care workers tried to match unknown children with addresses. But often addresses are nothing more than ruins. In at least 100 cases, nameless children have already been taken into custody.
Turkish social media was flooded with posts about the missing children, details of which floor they lived on in the collapsed buildings, and hopes that they had been rescued and taken to hospital.
Surviving relatives and representatives of the Ministry of Health traveled between medical centers trying to find them.
Injured people continue to arrive at the Adana hospital. They are shocked and exhausted.
Here, everyone survived, both patients and doctors.
Dr. Keskin lost relatives in the earthquake and took shelter in a hospital with her children when the tremors hit.
I ask her how she is coping.
“I’m good, I’m trying to be good because we [дітям] very necessary
“But I say, thank God, I still have children. I can think of no greater pain for a mother than losing a child.”
Next to us, small patients in the wards are waiting for their parents to return.
Some of them reunited. But the rest remain anonymous children of the earthquake.
