Students Rally Behind Earthquake Aid Relief

The instant Busra Dokmen, a freshman engineering student at UT-Austin, heard about the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck southern Turkey on Feb. 6, she called her mother to ask about her relatives who live in a small town in the region. Her grandparents were caught in the rubble and debris, but luckily, she said, her aunt helped recover them to safety. Elsewhere, her mother's cousin died beneath a sunken building before rescue teams could extract her.

Although Dokmen mentioned the mental and psychological toll of the catastrophe, she said it's important for her to remain optimistic about Turkey's recovery. To that end, a group of interfaith, interethnic UT undergrads called the Dialogue Student Association set up a fundraiser for relief efforts within days of the initial quake.

Through Venmo and Cash App crowdsourcing, social media campaigns, and selling baklava, Turkish delights, and other cultural baked goods on UT's yellow-bricked Speedway, Dialogue raised over $22,000 in direct aid in less than two weeks. Part of that came from the organization itself, which vowed to triple-match all donations, with the help of individual donors in the Turkish Austin community and nonprofits including the Raindrop Foundation.

To ensure direct delivery of the money, Dialogue donated just under half of the funds straight to known impacted families. The rest went to widely trusted aid groups in Turkey and Syria, including Ahbap, Syrian American Medical Society, and White Helmets. Mehmet Uzgoren, another student member of Dialogue, said that even though a majority of Dialogue members are Turkish, they wanted to be certain that Syrian victims were accounted for, too.

Mustafa Yazici, president of Dialogue Student Associa­tion, said that silver linings are important to seek out during disasters. But after another earthquake, this one 6.4 magnitude, struck the same region on Feb. 20 and raised the death toll to at least 44,000, he said it's difficult to harbor hope. At least, he says, "in Turkey, nobody's talking about the political divisions or cultural differences or the conflicts between different people. Every country, even if they are not on good terms with Turkey politically, they sent help," Yazici said.

While that unity is promising, Yazici says the scope of the trauma caused by these earthquakes is hard to fathom. "Even if your family isn't affected, we all experience what's called 'vicarious trauma.' For the past week, our Instagram feeds were flooded with videos of people trapped under the rubble and buildings falling. So for any Turkish person, no matter how affected your family is, everybody felt this."

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To help, consider donating to Dialogue Student Association (on Instagram @texasdsa) or nonprofits such as Ahbap, Bridge to Türkiye Fund, Search & Rescue Association (AKUT), CARE International, White Helmets, and NuDay Syria.