Turkish students at Indiana University are working to raise $50,000 for earthquake relief in Turkey.
Fundraising efforts come after a chain of devastating earthquakes have killed more than 36,000 people in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria.
The Turkish Student Association at IU has raised more than $18,000 from more than 250 donors on a Go-Fund-Me page since Wednesday.
Turkish Student Association President and IU School of Education graduate student Selim Yavuz said he is confident the group will reach its goal.
He said students started the fundraiser because they wanted to do anything they could to help friends and family and to stop feeling “useless” in being so far away from home.
Instead, he said, this fundraiser, “brings us together, this helps us to be strong.”
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Yavuz also said that prayers, notes of encouragement and donations from the IU faculty, staff, students and Bloomington community have been encouraging to students — many of whom have family back home who have been impacted.
“We lost our close friends,” he said. “They also lost their families, and we lost our uncles and cousins. And every loss really we feel deeply.”
And while Yavuz is thankful to the community, he said, “it is not enough for our country. Like more than 10 million people are affected directly, and most of them lost their houses.”
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Yavuz experienced a 7.6 magnitude earthquake that killed more than 18,000 when he was a child living in Kocaeli Province in Turkey in 1999. He said that he and other students are still having a hard time processing images of the damage in Turkey.
The money raised by the go-fund-me will be donated to the Turkish nonprofit organization AHBAP.