A Turkish soldier climbed onto the crane of an excavator on Saturday to search in an earthquake-damaged house in the city of Antioch for a mobile phone belonging to a 75-year-old woman who feared the death of her son after five days of losing contact with him.
The woman, who gave her name as Mama Bosra, asked aid workers to find her phone in order to contact her son as she waited in a nearby park where tents had been set up for people displaced from last week’s devastating earthquake.
Marathan Adil, a special operations soldier who came to Antakya from Ankara to help with the rescue operations, responded to the old lady’s plea and climbed to the balcony of the second floor of the damaged house.
Once Adel reached the balcony of the house, another rescuer handed him a red bag containing Mama Bosra’s belongings, including her mobile phone, before the digger lowered him again.
Adel paused to help put the bodies of people who had died inside nearby buildings onto the funeral home, before heading to the garden where Mama Bosra was anxiously waiting.
The phone’s battery died before she could call her son. But someone else in the garden who heard her son’s name said he knew him and said he was alive and well.
The person called the son’s number from his phone, before Mama Bosra picked up the phone from him and burst into tears as she heard her son’s voice for the first time since the earthquake occurred five days ago.
“It was as if you gave me the world,” Mama Bosra said of the moment she heard her son’s voice.
