JEANINE TOPELEN

As it happened, I was probably by chance in the safest spot I could be. For my Bas, it was slightly different. He had just seen me, I had just come from his office, but now he didn’t know where I was? The little church that was on the corner nearby–when I turned to look–it was just one big pile of dust. Where we were seemed quite safe–well safeish– though we did watch the back walls of the apartments, just off Latimer Square there, fall down. Suddenly, we found ourselves looking into people’s homes, like a dolls house–that was really weird. Then we started hearing noises from the church. There had been people in there doing some major repair work and now there was shouting and lots of people running around trying to pull them out of the rubble as all around us the liquefaction began coming up. People were trying to ring home and of course they couldn’t. And Bas didn’t know if I was actually in front of the church or not, he was worried that I might have been hit by some rubble, that something might have happened to me. Then we spotted each other… we were quite fortunate being that close together, to know, okay we are safe! Then it was a matter of getting to our daughter, Ayla, who was on the other side of town. Again, there was no phone contact and so it was an anxious time. We were trying to get there in the car, but we had no knowledge of what happened to her.  Of course, they also knew nothing of what happened to us. Had they been hit as bad as the city, we didn’t know? There were four other wee ones there as well… were they okay, were they crying, were they screaming… it was a long drive.