Taiwan continues providing hot food to quake victims in Turkey – Focus Taiwan

Istanbul, May 5 (CNA) Money donated by Taiwan’s people is continuing to help provide hot meals and other daily necessities to people in areas affected by an earthquake that struck southeastern Turkey in early February, according to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Mission in Ankara (TECM).

In a statement released on Friday, the TECM said Taiwan’s representative office in Turkey has teamed up with Türk Kızılay, also known as the Turkish Red Crescent, to provide food and sanitation materials to victims in need.

Through the relief program, Türk Kızılay, which is the Turkish affiliate of the International Red Crescent, and other Turkish agencies, such as the Earthquake Damage and Loss Estimation System and the Presidency of Migration Management, conducted coordination tasks to distribute US$5 million out of Taiwan’s total donations valued at more than US$43 million.

According to TECM, office chief Volkan Huang Chih-yang (黃志揚) visited the temblor’s epicenter Kahramanmaras province and surveyed how the relief program has been executed, aiming to help the displaced victims in 10 provinces that bore the brunt of the earthquake.

A magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria in the early hours of the morning of Feb. 6, leaving at least 17,000 people dead with thousands more injured.

Taiwan was one of the first countries which dispatched rescue teams to search for survivors soon after the earthquake hit, Huang said in the statement.

In addition, Huang said, the Taiwan government and the private sector worked together to raise more than US$43 million as well as about 415 tons of relief materials to help the displaced earthquake victims and reconstruct Turkey.

Huang said as Taiwan is also located in a seismic belt, people in the country have a good understanding of the disasters faced by Turkish and Syrian people, adding he was in Kahramanmaras, in particular, to boost the morale of the victims.

In the statement, Türk Kızılay said the organization has dispatched more than 900 personnel around Turkey and recruited an additional 1,400 volunteers to help with the relief program, including a workforce of more than 200 in Kahramanmaras.

On the back of the donations from Taiwan and other countries, Türk Kızılay has set up 225 tents in Kılavuzlu Millet Bahçesi, a national park in Kahramanmaras, to accommodate about 1,500 displaced victims, the TECM said.

With kitchens in place, relief workers cooked 750,000 meals and 17,000 loaves of bread a day for the victims, the TECM said.

Elsewhere, Türk Kızılay has also set up tents in the Vali Saim Çotur stadium to accommodate 1,800 to 2,000 victims through Taiwan’s donations, the TECM added.

In these tent areas, mobile showers and mobile laundry facilities have been built in a bid to solve sanitation problems caused by the earthquake, according to the TECM.

The TECM said it was grateful to generous people in Taiwan who also donated shower gel, towels, slippers, and drying machines to further safeguard the health of the victims.

In mid-April, the TECM announced that Taiwan has worked with the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants (ASAM) in Turkey to set up 10 mobile clinics across different neighborhoods in Hatay province, another area that was hit hard by the earthquake, to provide medical assistance to quake victims.

According to the TECM, humanitarian aid is a critical part of Taiwan’s foreign policy, and as a member of the international community, Taiwan always lends support whenever it’s necessary to help the international community with Türk Kızılay as one of Taiwan’s important partners in humanitarian relief.

The TECM said Taiwan would continue to follow the principles of “leave no one behind” and “health for all” under the World Health Organization to contribute to boosting global health through humanitarian aid.