The pre-death tale:"we'll go to the park when it's all over"

Iman hmrawi -Pascale sawma

A spacious green park, with the most beautiful toys and the best food, has recently opened, I promise you to go to it in a few days with this imagined image, Lama (30 years old) tried to erase the scene of the violent earthquake stuck in the head of her child, who is no more than six.

Lama pats her daughter on the shoulder and tells her that the world is not a bad place and that everything will be fine, she tells her as she hides in a school in Gaziantep, southern Turkey, which has turned into a shelter for survivors of the February 6 earthquake, afraid of its aftershocks.

Lama is one of the more than 3 million and 700 thousand Syrians displaced by the war in their country and moved to Turkey in search of a better life.

It never occurred to her that tragedies would follow her there, and that death would be imminent and close to her and her family, also in Turkey.

Lama survived the war and left Aleppo in 2012 for Lebanon, before settling in Turkey and working in the field of education and Journalism, she tried everything she could to make a quiet life with her two children and her husband, but this time the danger followed them in the form of an earthquake.

As a horror movie

"At half past four in the morning, the bed suddenly shook, my husband, my little daughter and I woke up, we didn't realize at first what was happening, everything in the house was shaking heavily, even the walls and the building, the place turned into a swing that takes us right and left," Lama describes the first moments of the earthquake, in her house located in the fourth tier of a residential neighborhood in Gaziantep.

Lama and her family did not find a place to shelter them, the sound of ambulances sounded everywhere, the squares, streets and parks were all teeming with earthquake victims, most of those who had cars took shelter inside from the rain and cold "the car was the safest place".

"I put my daughter with my neighbor in their car to protect her from the cold weather, and we waited in front of the building, looking at what had happened, thinking about whether the nightmare was really over," she said.

Lama and her family found a restaurant that opened its doors to people in the area, where they sat with many waiting to return home soon.

By 12 o'clock on Monday afternoon, they returned home, hoping that the earthquake was over, but the danger was not over, by half past one the nightmare returned with another earthquake: "we rushed to the street barefoot, but this time it was snowing, I found my family only the mosque to go to, but it was very cold, I heard that my daughter's school had opened its doors to the affected, so we turned to it and spent the night there.

The number of victims of the two violent earthquakes that hit southern Turkey exceeded 15 thousand, with tens of thousands injured and millions affected and displaced, and the number of destroyed buildings reached 6444 in the ten states affected by the earthquake, according to the agency "Anatolia".

"The morning of the second day after the earthquake, everyone came out of school, because of the water outage, we only found our house to return to, the mosques are crowded and it's very cold, and the other shelters are far away, so we decided to stay at home, “continues Lama, with feelings of pain, sorrow and fear mixed in her eyes.

Lama and her family returned home while many Syrians and Turks were packing their belongings and things to travel to other Turkish States, fleeing and fearing another upcoming earthquake.

"Talking is not like someone who lived in the moment, although we witnessed the bombing in Syria, but the fear of the earthquake is something else that is not like what we lived before," concludes Lama.

In detail, on Monday, February 6, with a magnitude of 6.6 on the Richter scale, an earthquake struck the nordagi region of Gaziantep province in southern Turkey, coinciding with an earthquake in Kahraman Marash province with a magnitude of 7.4 Richter, at a depth of 7 kilometers underground, according to the Turkish "presidency of disaster and Emergency Management".

Lama and her family are now hiding in the house with terror, trying to get over the disaster, something the Syrians have been accustomed to doing since 12 years of war, oppression and bloodshed...