‘They feel fear in their feet.’

Author Cathy Kelly describes the stories of the children and families she met living in Turkey’s devastated earthquake zone

Mattresses sit at odd angles in the crumbled remains of an apartment block in the once-bustling city of Hatay, two hours from the epicentre of Türkiye’s February earthquake.

That’s because in an earthquake, a humble mattress becomes a lifesaver. Used at the right angle, it becomes a vital ‘triangle of life’.

As UNICEF’s Sema Hosta, Chief of Communication in Türkiye explains: ‘You create a triangle of life with a sofa or a bed.’

Looking at Hatay’s pancaked apartment blocks and streets where there is nothing to be seen but giant shards of masonry and dust, it’s hard to imagine how anyone escaped the middle-of-the-night earthquake that hit Türkiye on February 6th this year.

At four seventeen am, a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit southern Turkey and neighbouring Syria.

The massive, once-in-a-lifetime event from the Anatolian fault line lasted less than a minute but to the terrified people living through it, hauling their little ones out of bed, carrying elderly relatives amid the screams as they desperately tried to escape, they say it felt like hours.

Ten hours later, another massive earthquake hit.

Thousands of aftershocks have since shaken the region, so that the younger children helped by UNICEF’s psychosocial support innocently say that no, they don’t feel the fear in their bellies‘they feel the fear in their feet.’

Two months later, Hatay resembles a city after an apocalypse in a Netflix drama.

A pink plastic trike sits in the rubble along with half–open suitcases, dragged by people fleeing and then abandoned.

Torn curtains flutter from wrecked buildings.

An entirely flattened piece of metal turns out, astonishingly, to be the remains of a car.

The people who survived - and some 50,000 people did not - are clinging to life in refugee camps, with nothing but the clothes they fled in.

They’re living in tents, whole families living and sleeping in what is basically a small room - freezing in winter, boiling in summer.

If they’re lucky, they might be in the container city in the repurposed Sutcu Iman University in Kahramanmaras. This means two small rooms, a toilet and shower.

Some 2.3 million people are living in formal camps, with many more living in tents beside houses they are afraid to enter. Syrian people, whose lives have been destroyed by twelve years of war, also suffered from the devastating earthquake.

An estimated 8.8 million people - including 3.7 million children - in Syria were affected. Pregnant women, breastfeeding women, small children who’ve known nothing but war, are now at risk of all the diseases caused by lack of sanitation and healthcare.

The people in Hatay and everywhere hit by the earthquake need some normality. Education for the children - tough when the schools are destroyed and many teachers and their families have left the region.

Children need emotional support to help them cope, to stop the trauma changing their lives internally as sharply as it has changed it externally.

‘’In the first twenty-four hours, you need food and shelter,’ says Sema Hosta. ‘Emotional, or what we call psychosocial support, for children is as vital as air and water.’

I’m with a UNICEF team in Türkiye to see UNICEF’s work in the crisis and as we leave the city of Gaziantep, we drive through a vast fertile river plain with mountains surrounding it. Tents begin to appear beside houses alongside odd arrangements of debris from people trying to clear away fallen buildings. Closer to Hatay, there are houses with giant jagged chunks ripped from them. People work in the fields where olive trees grow.

And then we reach Hatay itself. A cosmopolitan city founded in 300 BC, it’s the ancient city of Antioch, was a highlight of the Silk Road, and has long been known as a place of culture.

The present day Hatay is so shocking that we all enter a weird fugue state walking round it. Nobody can speak at the sight of the devastation.

Entire city blocks are nothing but crushed masonry and rubble, which is being cleared away. The oldest part of the town is home to a line of twenty dusty diggers which have been trying to make the place safe. Sema from UNICEF waves her elegant arms at the shattered buildings on a street which boasts the remains of an old French colonial hotel. ‘All gone,’ she says. ‘It is all gone.’

At the Orhlani tent camp, there are virtual streets where tents face each other.

One giant bubble tent has been given over to young children with watchful teachers who have been trained in psychosocial support to help and teach. School is a huge milestone in helping children and community after a disaster. Families return when the schools open and there is somewhere for traumatised kids to talk or draw through their pain.

The little ones light up when UNICEF teams come. Small children draw with donated colouring pens. I sit beside them and start drawing. Unicorns and clumsy dinosaurs with happy faces that can be coloured in. Everyone wants one.

It’s a joyous moment because little children can compartmentalise better than their older brothers and sisters. Here and now, we’re drawing.

But at night, they think about what happened. Like the eight-year-old little girl who brushed her teeth, hugged her mother goodnight and woke up to find her best friend had died.

Like the twelve-year-old boy who sits with his mother in a tent and has the ten-thousand-yard stare of someone with severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His mother, father and two siblings escaped alive. But this boy, finely featured and unable to smile, sits in the stifling tent on the single foam divan on which the whole family sleep, and his pain is so visible I want to hug him. I don’t

It’s afternoon in the tented refugee Selam Camii camp and the teenagers in the STEM classroom are working on maths.

These are some of the brightest young people around. The honours students. They’re studying for the Turkish version of the Leaving Cert which takes place in June. They have some English and are amenable to talking.

But ordinary questions are a minefield.

Did you know each other before? Pain flares in most of the teenagers’ eyes. Some did. But they’ve all lost friends. And a lot of hope.

What do you want to do after your exams, I ask.

The answer is shattering: after the earthquake, they live in the now. It can all be taken away in an instant, they tell me. They don’t think of the future.

One tall handsome teenager with the gleam of superintelligence in his eyes wants to study physics in university. We talk briefly about Einstein. Later, on Instagram, he messages me to say - almost with shame - that he won’t be going to university after all. The earthquake has lost that chance. He will have to move to another family in another part of Türkiye and work.

It will take years to rebuild these lives. The complex ballet that is the work of UNICEF, linking up shelter, medicine, sanitation schemes in a country where such things were not needed for many years, and help for children, will all take years.

The rest of the world has moved on. But Türkiye and Syria still need our help. UNICEF’s funding is at about thirty per cent of what they need.

Which means that seventy percent is still waiting to come in. That is why I ask you, as you read this, and imagine the children I met in your mind, to visit UNICEF Ireland’s website and support their work. However, you can.

Without your amazing help, the STEM young people will never be in college, never achieve their potential. And the little ones won’t be given the precious moments they need to find peace, have fun, and just be a child. For Sema and her team in Türkiye, the children are genuinely the future. Education and psychosocial support will mean they have a future.

For more information on UNICEF’s work for children in Türkiye and Syria, visit www.unicef.ie.