CNN
—
Like thousands of families in Turkey and Syria, Fansa’s life was devastated by last week’s earthquake. But Nilay Fansa and her husband Cengiz are also holding their “miracle baby” tight.
The February 6 earthquake left the family under the rubble of a seven-story apartment building in Kahramanmaras, Turkey. About 14 hours later she was released by Nilay, then her 4-year-old daughter Nil, and finally her Cengiz.
The body of a second daughter, Arryn, was found four days after the earthquake, and Phanthus surmised that baby Beerus had been killed as well.
“We were still in shock after the event,” Nilay told CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, through an interpreter on Tuesday. I thought I would see her dead body.”
What they didn’t know was that just minutes after the quake, a neighbor who thought they were chasing a cat meowed found an 8-month-old Beerus alive in the rubble.
“She was thrown from the fifth floor when the earthquake hit,” said Nilay. “She basically fell out of the window. Otherwise, where her cot was completely squashed under concrete.
“So she’s a miracle baby.”
After Beerus was released, she spent five days in intensive care with a broken leg, a fractured skull, and a cerebral hemorrhage. None of her rescuers recognized her, so social media users shared photos of her in hopes of finding her family.
Back inside the ruins, Nirei’s sister tells a neighbor that Phanta is still looking for the baby.
“I saw her pulled out on the first day,” Nirai said, the neighbor replied. “In fact, I saw the rescue happen just 30 minutes later.”
Through social media posts, the family identified baby Beerus and learned that she was taken to Adana City Teaching and Research Hospital, the largest trauma hospital in the earthquake zone, where they were eventually reunited.
“Of course I’m devastated about my other daughter,” Nirei told Gupta.
Eight days after the earthquake that killed more than 41,200 people in Turkey and Syria, stories of survivors are becoming increasingly rare.
UNICEF said it was “tragically evident” that the number of children being killed “continues to rise.”
UN Children’s Agency spokesman James Elder said 4.6 million children live in the 10 disaster-hit provinces of Turkey and 2.5 million children are affected in Syria. .
The World Health Organization emphasizes the need to “focus on trauma rehabilitation” for survivors.
WHO Turkey Representative Batyr Berdyklychev highlighted the “growing problem” of “traumatized people” and predicted the need for psychological and mental health services in the affected areas.
“People are just starting to understand what happened to them after this period of shock,” he said in Adana on Tuesday.