“The solely factor I might see was water, an enormous sea sweeping away all the things within the neighbourhood.
“Our avenue, our neighbours, our home, my mom and father, individuals’s voices, crying kids, cell phone screens fading with their house owners as they drowned.
“Do you know what is worse than hearing screams? The silence that comes after it. It’s this creepy peace that haunts me today.”
Ahlam al-Zenni describes the catastrophic inundation of Derna as if she’s in a trance, repeating herself.
“The silence that comes after it.”
The 39-year-old lived together with her son, her mother and father and her two brothers of their two-story home in Derna, the place they went by way of what individuals within the metropolis name Judgement Day.
“Local channels and social media had news of the storm, but we weren’t paying much attention. We kept saying it was a storm, that it would pass. The worst thing we thought would happen was wet carpets or damaged furniture. We never thought things would be more serious.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/9/26/the-judgement-of-derna?traffic_source=rss