Fuel- The next best thing to Food, Water and Shelter

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Van, Turkey, November 17.

It was another long night delivering coal, but we looked forward to not sleeping in a tent last night, as the City of Van provided us an old mattress on the floor in one of their office supply rooms to sleep. We now just wish for a shower, but that will still take a couple more days.

There was somewhere around a million people living in the city and surrounding areas, and now over 40 percent of the people have left. The earthquake did not cause a lot of buildings to fall as in Haiti, but it damaged so many beyond repair that city officials estimate that nearly half of the city  will need to be destroyed. It is very strange to see so many new and old high rise apartments and office buildings dark and vacant during the night.

People are moving out of their tents in the city every day, we guess that over 50 percent will leave the area to find warmth and jobs. The driver we had for the first few days decided to leave with his wife and children, and about fifteen other family members after making a little money from us. He is taking them south, about a 10 hour drive. They will not know anyone, but he said it is best for his son who was feeling sick. All of them are cold and need to find work. You can’t call the city of Van is a ghost city yet because there are still so many people here, but it will take decades to ever be what it what was.

In the beginning days of our fuel delivery we focused on giving small amounts of coal to as many elderly and single mothers as possible, but in these last few days we have increased the amounts to last each family at least a month. We estimate that each family will use about a 60 pound bag of coal per day through the winter. We feel that if they have enough coal to last at least a month, they will be able to spend more time focusing on other needs, and hopefully, it will encourage people to stay and try to rebuild.

This is probably the last blog of our trip. Tonight, we will have delivered all the coal we had purchased.

Thanks again to all our board members, volunteers and donors for truly making Fuel Relief Fund an international nonprofit aid agency. We know the people of Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Haiti, Japan and now Turkey, thank us all very much.

Ted