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Words and photos by Middle East correspondent Tom Joyner in Adana, Türkiye

These tiny babies survived Türkiye's quake, but the fight of their lives is only just beginning

Some of the youngest survivors of Türkiye's earthquake were just babies. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)
The orphanage in Türkiye's seaside city of Mersin has taken in infants whose parents are presumed dead. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

This little boy is one of nearly a dozen babies who were brought to an orphanage in Türkiye's seaside city of Mersin after a devastating earthquake two months ago.

Infants were among those found in the rubble of collapsed buildings after the earthquake. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Unlike adults, infants who survived under collapsed buildings were helpless beneath the twisted metal and concrete, less able to call out to nearby rescuers, let alone text friends their location.

A nurse supervises two babies playing in an orphanage for infants. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Staff at the orphanage take it in turns to work through the night, keeping a watchful eye over their wards.

A Turkish nanny holds a tiny baby in an orphanage, hoping to soothe the boy back to sleep. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Each evening, two nannies, Meral Demirkiran and Gönül Çapuk, work their way through the nursery, scooping up each infant and cooing, while feeding them from a bottle.

At one end of the room, a little boy reaches a hand beyond the edge of his cot and gives an anguished gurgle.

Ms Çapuk rushes to reassure him while juggling another child in her other arm.

Once they're done, the pair gently replace each child in their cots for the night.

"Our hands are always full with the babies," Ms Demirkiran says.

"We try not to let them feel too much sorrow. We cry with them when they cry."

Some of the children hold onto the staff tightly. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)
The infants range in age from newborn to six years old. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

The orphanage, a squat concrete block on a main road next to a dental hospital, was once a private drug rehab clinic. Metal grills line the stairwell like bars on a jail cell.

The small library includes dog-eared translations of Steinbeck and Twilight. At the building's rear is a dilapidated basketball court.

When the earthquakes struck in February, the orphanage's 35 staff — psychologists, nurses, teachers and administrators — were deployed to the quake zone to assist.

Today, it's one of dozens of centres across the region housing a wave of children lost in the chaos of February's disaster with no homes to return to and no family to claim them.

In many cases, the children's parents are among the more than 50,000 reported killed or presumed dead.

Staff at the orphanage keep a watchful eye over the children in their care. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

"We are trying to do our best for the children," says Zelal Çakar, one of the orphanage's three psychologists providing continuous counselling.

"I have been working with kids for eight or nine years, and I've never seen children so hungry for love."

In a small room at the end of a long corridor, a group of seven children sit making colourful artworks under the supervision of two social workers.

A boy clambers onto a table to snatch a pencil from a girl sitting across from him, who lets out a squeal. Two sisters sit absorbed, painting identical grassy landscapes.

On the walls around them hang some finished works – scrawls of Disney princesses and a scene depicting two swaying palms and a small sailboat drifting towards a setting sun.

"They were in a bad way when they arrived," says Merve Erol, a gym instructor who had spent the morning teaching the children to somersault.

"They were not well psychologically."

Turkish and Syrian children orphaned by the earthquakes participate in an art class organised by social workers. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)
Artwork created by Turkish and Syrian children orphaned by the earthquakes hangs on the wall of a classroom in a social service centre where they live. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Art classes, along with physical conditioning and reading lessons, are now part of a new daily routine for the children.

Behind the scenes, caseworkers scramble to track down any remaining relatives who might offer a more permanent home.

Authorities have relied largely on DNA matching to link children to surviving family members.

"Families have gotten in touch with us about their missing children, but, as you know, babies faces are hard to distinguish," says Selman Fidan, the manager of the orphanage.

There are plenty of cases though where children will end up in foster care, or adopted.

In some instances, the children will spend their childhood years in the social care system, bouncing from foster home to foster home, until the day they turn 18.

Occasionally, their caseworkers stumble onto good news. A team in Adana, a city to the east, recently matched a child in their care with a lost family member in Syria.

City authorities are now preparing a reunion across the border.

A corridor inside an orphanage looking after children orphaned by the earthquakes shows some painted murals and a metal grate covering the stairwell. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)
Two children's bikes lay on the ground on a basketball court attached to an orphanage. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

They may not outwardly show it, but each child harbours a deep-seated trauma from the earthquakes that orphanage staff fear will only fully unfurl once they grow older.

The children have developed close emotional bonds with the staff, leaping into their arms and burying their faces in their chests like they would with their own parents.

The staff have equally grown fond of the children, who have no hesitation in playfully tugging on their hair while falling into fits of giggles.

Many find it hard to imagine the idea of eventually relinquishing the children into foster care.

"They hold us tight," says Ms Erol, who has two young kids of her own.

"We are very sad because they're going to leave eventually."

Turkish and Syrian children are observed by staff as they play in a room at a social service centre. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)
Toys lay in the heap in a room at a social service centre after being picked up by children. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

One particularly thorny task, psychologist Ms Çakar says, was finding a way to explain to the kids what an enormous and sudden change in their lives the earthquakes have caused.

Some are still too young even to grasp the death of their parents.

"In Turkish culture, we don't say someone 'died'. We say 'passed away' or 'lost'. But they cannot understand these words," she says.

"We have had meetings with the children where we try to get them to face their feelings. Otherwise, it will hit them in the future even harder than now."

The dual earthquakes in February have caused deep wounds among an entire generation of children across southern Türkiye and Syria.

A group of young boys play with a football on a street in Türkiye near the harbour where many buildings were destroyed in the earthquakes. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Some of the millions affected are so young they won't ever remember a time before the earthquakes – yet their entire lives will be forever defined by them.

Two months on from the quakes, some of the mess has been cleared away, but millions of Turks are adjusting to a new hardship: surviving in the ruins without a home or livelihood.

The days after the disaster brought with them intense attention – rescue teams, aid workers and TV camera crews poured in from around the world.

Today, the world's eyes have all but moved on.

In Hatay province, tents to house the homeless have sprung up everywhere.

Inside, there is little more than mattresses, blankets and a few meagre possessions scavenged from the collapsed remains of the occupant's homes. Water and food is in scarce supply.

In the village of Sutaşı, nestled in the foothills of the Nur mountains on the Mediterranean coast, nearly 100 people have moved into a handful of tents set up in a front yard along a main street.

A group of children stand in the makeshift tent camp where they live in their village after their homes were destroyed or damaged in the earthquakes. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

The occupants — all families whose homes in the surrounding blocks were either destroyed or rendered unlivable — share a single toilet in a neighbour's backyard.

For food, some were able to rescue armfuls of supplies from the remains of their own homes, while others rely on aid donations and the greengage plums that grow in abundance across the valley.

"It's not fit for living here," says Gazi Tum, one of a group of men from the village who cut down a thicket of trees to make a clearing for the tents.

At first, Mr Tum and his wife lived with 16 others in one tent, until it became too crowded and the families split up.

They didn't have to move far.

A line of tents set up in a tent camp on the grounds of a university campus. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

Each tent in the camp is separated by a narrow walkway barely a foot wide.

Roughly one hundred people live in the camp who were made homeless by the earthquakes. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

There is little privacy though neighbours treat each other with respect. Meals are shared and adults watch over other parents' children as well as their own.

"It doesn't have to be this way," Mr Tum says, visibly frustrated.

"This is a zone prone to earthquakes. But still no-one in the government made plans for this."

Anger among millions of Turks in the earthquake zone flared in February as they waited for help from the government that many believe came too late, or in some cases not at all.

Some were reduced to digging through snow-capped rubble with their bare hands for missing relatives, even as international rescue crews were arriving in larger cities to the north.

A pile of home photographs showing an unknown woman and family lay abandoned on the ground near a destroyed residential building. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

In Sutaşı and neighbouring villages, that anger has simmered in the two months since the quakes. White hot fury has melted to give way to resignation and frustration.

In a matter of weeks, nationwide elections will decide the future of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose leadership during the disaster is a key election issue.

"Of course the people here have already decided how they'll vote," Mr Tum says.

As he speaks, Mr Tum steps gingerly between the cinder blocks holding down the edges of the tents.

"How many people live here in this tent?" he asks an 11-year-old boy named Haidarr.

Turkish boy Haidarr, 11, stands on a street in his village near the tent camp where he lives. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)

For a moment, the man counts out loud – "Your mum, your father and your grandmother" – before the boy answers: five.

The children in the camp have missed months of school.

"Our parents don't let us go to school. Someone should build us a prefabricated school," says another girl.

"We're afraid to go back. We could die there if there's another earthquake," Haidarr concurs.

In the summer, the residents of the tent camp worry about invading wildlife like snakes, as well as sweltering temperatures.

Even by mid-April the tents are uncomfortable to bear in the middle of the day.

For the millions of Turks displaced in the disaster, there are no clear plans for how long they will live in this sort of temporary existence.

Neighbourhoods flattened by the earthquake in many cities are yet to be cleared, let alone rebuilt.

That could take years.

A lone tree stands on a street covered in rubble near the harbour. Some rubble has been cleared, but many damaged or destroyed buildings remain. (ABC News: Tom Joyner)
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