Sat: Is It a Hearing If No One is Listening?

I'm great at multitasking. I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at once.

WTF Are These Turkeys Doing?

A worsening security situation in southern Turkey has disrupted rescue efforts following Monday's deadly earthquake, international groups have said.

German rescue workers and the Austrian army paused their search operations, citing clashes between unnamed groups.

There have also been reports of looting.

Turkey's president said he would use emergency powers to punish anyone breaking the law.

The death toll from the earthquake has now surpassed 25,000 and hope is fading of finding many more survivors under the rubble, despite cases of miraculous rescues.

There were reports early on Saturday that clashes between unidentified groups in the Hatay province had left dozens of personnel from the Austrian Forces Disaster Relief Unit seeking shelter in a base camp with other international organisations.

Born An Orphan

In the afternoon of that day when a series of earthquakes ripped through Turkey and Syria, Dr Hany Maarouf, 43, returned to his duties at the Jehan Hospital in Afrin, in Syria’s northwest, having made sure his wife and seven children were safe.

At about 3pm, a man and woman ran in, the man holding in his arms a small bundle, shouting that they needed a paediatrician. Their faces showed panic that had turned to despair. This was the sixth hospital they had run to with their precious bundle – baby Aya, who had just been born in the rubble of a collapsed building to a mother who had died.

Assuring them that he was a paediatrician, Maarouf gently took the baby from them but what he saw “terrified” him.

“I wasn’t sure she was even alive – she was pale, cold, silent. Her limbs were blue and her body was covered with bruises,” he recalled.

Then a faint pulse was discovered and he and his team sprang into action. They wrapped the baby with warmed blankets and placed her in an incubator, watching her until she warmed up enough that they were able to find a vein to hook her up to calcium and glucose solutions.

The man who had brought her in – her aunt’s husband – and the woman who accompanied him – a neighbour – were relieved that Aya was going to be saved, but the cruel reality of that day meant they could not stay any longer by her side as they had to go find their own families, and possibly count and bury their dead.

Four days after baby Aya was first brought in and named by the hospital staff, Maarouf tells Al Jazeera that she is doing much better and that the hospital team has pulled together to make sure she is well taken care of. Although she still spends the day in an incubator, baby Aya is being breastfed by a volunteer who comes in several times a day, which provides her with the human, skin-to-skin contact babies need to thrive, in addition to the antibodies and nutrients that can only be found in human breast-milk.



And she has thrived, Maarouf says proudly, adding that she is putting on weight, showing all the positive indicators and all-around doing much better than he had expected. While he, as a father of seven, often finds himself too deeply moved by the baby’s plight to spend too much time at her side, many of the nursing staff visit her, sitting by her incubator and watching her sleep or coo and wave her arms.