Turkish restaurant in Harrogate helps raises £6,000 for earthquake appeal
It has now been a month since the disaster in Turkey and Syria
A restaurant in Harrogate has managed to help raise roughly £6,000 to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey in Syria.
Today marks a month since the disaster happened.
Firat Bulut owns the Konak Meze Turkish restaurants in Horsforth and Harrogate. They've been donating a percentage of every meal to the appeal as well as setting up donation boxes at both businesses. He tells it will take years to recover: "It's not just about one week or two weeks, this is going to take years to rebuild the community and rebuild the trust again. To rebuild their own personal mental health. It's really important, so for this reason we are trying to collect donations in every way that we can."
Firat says his relatives are all safe but he is hearing heart-breaking stories from other families in Turkey: "They lost kids, teenage kids with no parents, there is a wife who lost two kids and her husband, I don't know how they can rebuild that kind of life again."
Meanwhile, the head of the UN children's agency has said reuniting children with their missing family has become a top priority in the aftermath of last month's massive earthquake.
Unicef executive director Catherine Russell said the February 6 quake that rocked south east Turkey and parts of northern Syria has compounded existing crises in war-torn Syria.
"The first challenge is figuring out if (the) children's parents are alive in some place, and if they are trying to reunite them," she told the Associated Press, speaking at a school in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
Since the quake, the school has been turned into a shelter for families who lost their homes.
In Turkey, Derya Yanik, the minister for family affairs, said on Wednesday that more than 1,800 "unaccompanied children" have been reunited with their families since the quake.
Efforts were underway to identify 83 other children and reunite them with family members, Ms Yanik said.
Some of the children who have not been identified were still in intensive care in hospitals in Turkey, she added, and more than 350,000 families had applied to foster children orphaned by the quake.
The Turkey-Syria earthquake killed at least 50,000 people and injured many more, according to the UN with tens of thousands still missing and hundreds of thousands homeless.
In Syria, at least 6,000 were killed in total, in both government-controlled areas and in the rebel-held territory in the country's north west.