Hava Tuncay was living in a tent in the center of the Turkish city of Antakya when a new earthquake occurred on Monday night. She was already having trouble sleeping after previous tremors rendered her and her children homeless two weeks ago.
“I can’t sleep at night,” she told Reuters outside her tent. “Will the same thing happen? Will we witness another earthquake? We are very afraid. I haven’t slept for a week.”
Minutes later, the earth began to sway under her feet, and the stove on which a boiling teapot had fallen fell.
The few damaged buildings that had survived previous tremors two weeks ago shook violently, and more of their facades collapsed.
Dust rose from the ground as concrete and bricks shattered, raising a dark cloud in the air that obstructed vision. Some of the buildings around the park still creaked minutes after the quake.
Shouts and loud voices rose in the camp set up in the central park.
And when fear overwhelmed the people, they fled, some without shoes.
Some grabbed their children and wives and hugged them tightly, and some ran helplessly. Others fell to the ground.
A new earthquake in Turkey and Syria.. Scenes of panic and terror among the population
A recurring nightmare
Hava, 33, a single mother of three, first fled her tent, screaming and crying. She collapsed to the ground, almost losing consciousness. The fear that prevented her from sleeping at night for two weeks has now become embodied and has become a reality that she lives and suffers her bitterness.
Muhammad Oslo, 18, the son of Hava, and other residents ran to her, trying to comfort her. “My heart is pounding,” she said.
Aid workers who fanned out in the park to check on people told her to sit down, calm down and drink some water. But her heart was elsewhere. She wanted to check on her two daughters, who had stayed with their grandmother in a nearby village for the night so that they could take a bath.
Muhammad told his two sisters over the phone not to enter any building. One of them replied, “There was an earthquake and we left,” and added that the electricity was cut off.
Hava said she would leave the city and go to Edirne, on Turkey’s northwest border, 1,350 km away.
“I’ll take you and we’ll leave,” she told her daughter. The daughter replied, “Where are we going? Won’t there be an earthquake? There will be an earthquake, too.”
On Tuesday, Reuters saw Hava with Mehmet and her two daughters outside the city center of Antakya as they boarded a bus that would take them to Edirne for free.
“I have a severe headache,” Hava told Reuters. “You saw how we were yesterday.”
Murat Vural, a 47-year-old blacksmith who was in the camp on Monday, felt the quake was the resurrection. “For me, this is one of the signs of the times,” he said. “I felt we were going to die, and we were going to be buried here.”
He called his friend, shortly after the earthquake, to tell him they had to leave the city as well.
“This is no longer a place we can stay in. We worry about our lives most of the time. Death is a relief for everyone, but life is also beautiful,” he said.
