earthquake

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few months, it’s the fact that life can throw things at you that are totally out of your control, and that with that, there’s a big difference between knowing/believing in something and actually experiencing it. Just like there’s a big difference between believing in something and actually fighting for it.

I haven’t really had the chance to update anyone other than on Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media platforms that only allow a few words or paragraphs, but unfortunately, the account of my earthquake experience I wrote in August, wasn’t my last experience of one. At the end of October, Italy was hit with another three earthquakes within the space of 5 days. It was exactly three months and two days after the first one that I was hiding under a desk again, and another few days after that, I was sleeping in a tent and seeing our Italian home once again turn to ruin.

I know this isn’t something for a fashion blog, and has probably bored you to death if you have seen my updates elsewhere, but it genuinely has been a huge and traumatic part of my life recently. Falling into a routine of having to deal with aftershocks and your belongings breaking around you is not something normal to deal with.

But I’m a part believer in taking something out of everything, which means I’ve decided to take a lesson from all of this. If there are tragic things in life we can’t control, then the things we can control should be the things we fight and push on for.

It seems like a bizarre thing to compare it to, and I, of course, know I came out of the situation in a far safer and luckier place, but I now have empathy for those who have been through similar situations, specifically relating to issues which I believe in, like those affected by the Rana Plaza disaster for example. Although I can’t really compare the two, there are many accounts which state it felt like an earthquake coming on – all the machines rattling and the building starting to cave in on itself.

But the harsh reality and the unfortunate truth of that disaster was that it was avoidable. It was somebody’s fault that thousands died and were injured. It’s nobody’s fault that an earthquake happens; it’s just the earth being the earth.

We have the power to make change and to use our voice so that avoidable tragedies are just that – avoidable. Factories shouldn’t collapse because the managers are being forced to risk it. Factories shouldn’t catch on fire because of poor working conditions. Workers shouldn’t die because there are no fire exits. Workers shouldn’t die because their only source of income is working in a factory that is ready to collapse.

I have the ability to inspire others to try and fight for change, and that’s exactly what it should be – a fight. The end goal of every fight is to win, and now I want to fight harder because I know what it’s like to feel helpless.

There’s nothing you can do when an earthquake strikes other than to drop, cover and hold. But there is so much to be done when it comes to human rights, the environment and equality, especially across an industry which exploits all three (and more). When a factory catches fire, there should be fire exits and extinguishers and there should be people fighting to put out the flames and never let them light up again.

The photos in this blog post were taken in Italy. The confetti photos were taken during the carnival in Ascoli Piceno – one of the local towns which I came to know and love, and which I know is still dealing with the after-effects of the 2016 earthquakes. 

There are ways to stop and change the outcome of certain scenarios, even if it takes time and effort. It’s worth it. That’s one similarity between a natural disaster and something man-made. We can put precautions in place. We can make buildings stronger and we can stop people from going inside of them if the risk is too high, because we know profit isn’t worth people’s lives.

‘We’  is anyone who contributes to the way things are already – the consumers who buy from these exploitive brands and send out the signal that they’re doing a good job; the buyers in charge of sourcing factories; the designers and teams that decide on the high numbers of collections per year; the managers of the factories being exploited by the teams providing those high numbers.

But mainly, it’s us, the consumers and believers which need to start building the momentum.

We need to start moving and show those in charge that we will cause a huge wave of power if they don’t start getting prepared. We can start building up the pressure (just like in an earthquake) so that they have no choice but to let things release and start making the change to deal with all the changes. There is so much they (the brands, the manufacturers, the governments in charge of laws and legislations) could be doing, so we need to show them that there is actually a rhyme and a reason to making it happen.

This is also a good time for me to touch on politics and the current situation with the President-Elect in the US. It might not have been the decision that a lot of us/you, in America, wanted, but it’s what we have. That doesn’t mean to say it has to stay that way, though, or that we have to settle for it. We should take the same attitude for issues we believe in, across the board. Stand up, voice your opinions and your concerns – fight… (without violence and causing damage that is.)

I can’t say exactly how I’m going to up the ante in my personal fighting because as I have mentioned several times throughout this post, the past few months have been quite stressful and I haven’t quite got my blogging/activist/ethical advocate head straight, but I know that for sure I won’t let something natural and uncontrollable get in my way. It’s a bit like what I said about influencers using their voices – if you have the ability to make a change, try your very best to actually make it happen.

Don’t just sit and stay still unless you physically can’t. Don’t leave it to ‘everyone else’ because there are helpless people out there who need you to be their help.

For those of you somewhat interested, I can update you all by saying that I am now on my way to (or by the time you read this, already am in) Sardinia. It’s a less earthquake-prone Italian island, where I’ll be spending a few months to get back on my feet and experience yet another culture. The past few weeks have been ones of uncertainty, but hopefully, this time will resolve that. 2016 hasn’t been perfect for the most of us, but we still have a bit of time to try again. Who’s with me?

(Definitely not a fashion related post, but an important one nonetheless.) I don’t mean to be dramatic as I write this. I don’t mean to worry anyone or make my experience seem worse than others, because I know it wasn’t, in fact, I’ve never felt luckier.

My experience of the earthquake was minor compared to others.
Please donate to Croce Rossa Italiana to help those in need.

You may have seen on Twitter or Facebook or wherever else I post, but if not, then you won’t know that on Wednesday 24th August at 3.36am, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake hit the region of Italy where I am currently staying. Again, I am safe and even after not knowing where she was for four hours of the morning after, even our travelling cat Paloma was found without a scratch.

But, I have never and I hope that I will never again experience something so terrifying. I know that earthquakes happen all over the world fairly frequently, whether that be big or small, and I know that there are even more scarring experiences to go through, but even the sound of a car driving down our road is now enough to make me feel like crying again.

I’ve learnt about earthquakes before. I’ve researched them, my family even planned out the sort of thing we would do if one hit before we started travelling through Italy, so it’s not like we knew it could never happen… it’s just you never really think it will. And when it does, there’s no warning. There’s no gradual build up. In a matter of seconds it can feel like your whole world is about to shatter, and unfortunately for some, this time – it did.

For me the worst part is exactly that; how sudden it was. I go to bed fairly late. I fell asleep at about half past 1 in the morning, after watching an ASMR video because sometimes I find them relaxing to watch before I drift off. I put my laptop down, turned off my side light and closed my eyes. I hadn’t said goodnight to my parents or brother, and I hadn’t given my cat a cuddle; I’d just simply fallen asleep, as you do, normally, definitely not thinking about what would happen in 2 hours’ time.

I feel rather stupid now, because when I go over the events (which let me tell you, isn’t pleasant to do – I’m crying as I type this) I remember sitting bolt upright in my bed when I first heard the rumbles and felt the shakes (more on this in a moment) and thinking – ‘What’s that?’. It only really clicked in my mind when I heard my mum call out, “Get under a table!”, a phrase we’d discussed when researching what to do if it ever happened.

My first conscious action was to scream.

I then attempted to get under my bed, because I’m fairly slim and I’ve done it before in order to get a box out from underneath it, but in the pitch black, with your heart racing and nothing making sense, climbing under a small space is near impossible. So I crawled as quickly as I could to the desk at one side of the room, crossed my arms over my knees and closed my eyes.

Last night (as in, the night before I wrote this – 27th August), we went to a restaurant by the sea (where nothing was effected by the earthquake) to try and calm ourselves. We were by a railway line and a train came past. My dad put his hand on my arm and said “It’s just a train.”, and I was a bit confused, but as soon as it passed, I froze, because I knew exactly why he’d said it. For a split second I thought I would be fine, but all of a sudden the tears came spilling out and I had to try my hardest not to close my eyes so I didn’t think back to the night.

The train was nothing in comparison to what I felt and heard, but anything can set me off now. It’s so hard to explain.

In my opinion, it’s like the earth roared. It was so dark and so sudden that I couldn’t even allow myself to see what was actually happening as the building shook. I can’t explain it. You don’t know what an earthquake feels like until you feel one – and I hope none of you reading this ever will, or ever have, because trust me, you really don’t want to.

I believe the main quake lasted about 20 seconds. In that time, I got under my desk, my mum found a space under a table outside of the bedrooms, my brother stayed put upstairs where he sleeps, and my dad attempted to get to my room. Also in that time, I finally managed to open my eyes as the shaking and roaring faded. Things were scattered across the floor, ornaments were broken and the cupboard doors had opened to let things fly out.

I was crying through all of it, but the tears and hyperventilating didn’t come until there was light from somewhere (I still honestly have no idea where from – one of my parents’ torches? The main lights?) and I looked up at the wall above the bed.

There’s now a diagonal crack from the bottom corner to the top corner, with brick exposed and plaster completely gone. I looked to the floor and I could see dust and paint and as I finally got to my feet, I had to try my best to tip toe around broken glass. The scary thought I have is that I had no idea any of this was happening at the time. The only thing you worry about in terms of destruction, is how to avoid it – not what’s actually being destroyed.

My brother came in my room at one point, and tried to join me under the table… once the shaking had stopped, my dad dashed downstairs as safely as he could to get bottles of water, and once he was back, we huddled in the hallway under tables and turned up sofas and decided what to do next.

This is why I’m grateful for my surroundings – we were able to safely get out of the house and sit on sunbeds in the open garden where nothing could fall on top of us in the event of an aftershock. None of us had injuries – our main concern of wellbeing was our cat, who like I said, we didn’t find until four hours later when the sun had come up. She was upstairs where the least damage had occurred, hiding behind some drawers and a sofa. I’ve never been so happy to see a cat in my life.

I’ve also never been so happy for WiFi. The connection where we are isn’t the greatest, in fact it drives me mad most of the time, especially when it comes to blogging, but somehow it was still going strong for us to use. My brother had his iPad and was Googling what we should do next – what we should check, where we should go, and whether anything was going to happen again.

The internet couldn’t give us exact answers, but it made us feel like we weren’t so alone as we sat under the stars (and what seemed to be a meteor shower – a detail of this story I keep forgetting to mention to people) and tried to compose ourselves, which is what I’m still doing four days later, and what I expect I’ll still be doing in four weeks’ time at this rate.

What I’ve written really hasn’t explained the pure terror of that morning. My brain was trying to figure so much out all at one time. I didn’t have my life flash before my eyes, but I’m certain at one point I gulped and realised I still hadn’t met my newborn nephew who’s just turned a month old. I was shaking outside from the shock rather than the cold and I didn’t want my dad to let go of me.

The aftershocks started soon after. The biggest one we’ve experienced so far was about an hour after the main hit, rumbling for a good few seconds and knocking whatever we heard in the distance to the ground (we believe it may have been an abandoned farm building nearby). Aftershocks are still happening, and they’re what is keeping me from going inside to write this.

There are two very different sensations – an aftershock outside and an aftershock inside.
Outside, it’s mainly under your feet. You feel it and you hear it, and it unsettles you, but if you’re in an area where nothing can fall, you know you’re safe. Inside however, it’s all around you; the building shakes and almost sways, like it’s about to push up from the ground, and even if it lasts two seconds, you’re already looking for the nearest table.

Apparently it is extremely rare for a strong aftershock to hit again, but it’s not impossible. What should happen from now on, is tiny rumbles until they fade away completely. It might take a week, it might take two… we still might feel something in a month’s time. That’s the thing with earthquakes – you can’t ever know.

So we’re still sleeping outside. Our cat stays in a locked room during the day, before joining us in the tent during the night. We could go back in, because we’ve had a builder take a look at the damage in all of the rooms, and we’ve had the gas tank checked for leaks (“It’s the Season 4 of my life!”, I joked to a friend recently – you can make me feel better by understanding that reference) but it’s just the thought of experiencing it again, in the same place, barely a week after, that is terrifying (me, mainly).

My experience of the earthquake was minor compared to others.
Please donate to Croce Rossa Italiana to help those in need.

I really wish I could turn back time. If I could ask for anything right now, it would be to go back to the day before when I was getting on with my work and life and being productive and feeling safe. I’d really like a nice sleep in my bed without having to look up at the ceiling which has cracks in it.

But that’s why I started this post by saying ‘I don’t want to be dramatic’.
I know it could be worse.

I could have no bed to go back into at all. The cracks on my phone could be because it got smashed under rubble, rather than the fact I dropped it a few months ago. The tent we’re sleeping in could be because we have no house to return to, rather than just because we’re afraid. We could have been an hour and a half away, in a town we had a coffee in last winter, watching everything we know and love fade away.

My heart breaks every time I think about the fact that other families who experienced the same thing at the same time as us, are no longer whole. I hate that I know a girl younger than me had to survive 24 hours under the rubble of her house, and that babies have lost their very short lives. And I hate how there was nothing anyone could do to prevent any of it.

But I feel so grateful that we’re in a country where there are resources to help those in worse conditions, and that it took me all of two minutes to donate to the Italian Red Cross to help in a small way, and that a friend of mine is helping in the preparation for food to be delivered to effected villages… and that with every day it’s going to get easier and that I’m safe.

This trauma isn’t going to be easy to get over. Driving up and down the unpaved road nearby feels rather similar to how my bed shook and moved, and I’m going to be reminded by it every day with all the damage, until the redecorators finally leave at some point. But I’m okay. I obviously might not be blogging as much until I feel comfortable at my desk again, but I’m okay.

I experienced an earthquake and I guess it’s just another story to add to the list. A list that will hopefully make me stronger, and a list that I can hopefully pass on to help others.