A Turkish soldier was lifted to the second floor of an earthquake-damaged building in Turkey in an excavator bucket to enter a crumbling apartment behind a cellphone belonging to a 75-year-old woman who feared her son was dead after five no contact days.
A woman from the city of Antakya identified as Mama Busra asked rescuers on Saturday (11) to find her phone. She is housed in a makeshift tent in a park to accommodate those who lost their homes in the tragedy earlier this month, which has already killed more than 24,000 people in the country.
In a narrow street turned into a dead end by the destruction of the earthquake, the basement of the building collapsed, the facade partially collapsed, windows were broken and cracks were exposed.
As soon as Murathan Adil, the rescuer, reached the balcony, another rescue worker handed him a red bag containing Mama Busra’s belongings, including her phone, before the bulldozer lowered it back down.
Stopping briefly to help load bodies dug up from neighboring buildings into a hearse, Adil then drove to the park where Mama Busra was waiting anxiously.
The phone’s battery died before she could call her son. But someone else in the park heard her son’s name, said she knew him and that he was alive and well.
The person dialed the son’s number on his phone. He answered—and Mama Busra burst into tears as she heard her son’s voice for the first time since the earthquake five days earlier.
“It’s like you gave me the world,” said Mama Busra, moved, about the moment she heard her son’s voice.
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