Durban woman's harrowing earthquake ordeal in Myanmar
A Durban woman who had been teaching in Myanmar has returned home after miraculously surviving the Southeast Asian country's most powerful earthquake in more than a century.
Hunsraj had just returned to her apartment from a parent-teacher conference that marked the start of a two-month holiday when disaster struck at around lunchtime on Friday, 28 March.
“I could feel a slight shake, and then suddenly the building started shaking so violently. I didn’t have time to even think to grab something to protect me or even go under a table. [The building] fell. Once it fell, we thought it was over. But the second one happened and pushed the building further down.”
The 51-year-old had been trapped for about an hour before she managed to push out a board above her head to get out.
After emerging from the rubble, she realised she was on top of a crumbled building.
"I was on the top section of the building. That’s how low the building had dropped.
I was on the 8th floor. The 9th, 10th and 11th [floors] fell sidewards. But unfortunately, the people below us did not.”
With no emergency crews in sight, survivors had to clear their own way out.
Hunsraj and a few others crawled down the large heap of concrete, metal, and glass, helped only by a monk from a temple next door to the collapsed block of flats, and a brave young boy who had also managed to free himself.
Her next-door neighbour, who is also her friend, was stuck for much longer. About five hours passed before she was freed.
“While I was inside, I could hear people screaming. My friend was screaming, and I couldn’t see her because there was rubble on top of us.
There was no way anyone would have been able to rescue us because nobody could see where we were underneath the rubble.
When I got out of the building, it seemed scarily quiet.”
Hunsraj, a mother-of-one, had worked as a teacher in Durban.
She says she had wanted to explore the world and looked for opportunities overseas. After hearing 'wonderful things' about Myanmar, she boarded a plane in April last year.
Hunsraj was days away from marking a full year in the Southeast Asian country when the 7.7 magnitude earthquake caused devastation across Mandalay and several other cities in Myanmar.
The tremor was also felt in neighbouring countries including China and Thailand.
In Bangkok, a high-rise building that had been under construction came crashing down, killing more than two dozen people.
The overall death toll of the disaster is at over 3 800, with nearly 5 000 people injured.
In the aftermath, tens of thousands of people were displaced, with some seeking shelter in tent encampments.
Hunsraj was one of them, but she only spent a few days in a camp before her school stepped in and arranged other temporary accommodation for her and her colleagues.
“Our passports, our money, our clothes, our shoes - we lost everything! The school was kind enough though to put us up in a hostel-kind-of-situation.
We refused to go to any building that had more than two levels. But it was traumatic as well because there were a lot of aftershocks.”
READ: Durban family pleads for mom's return from quake-hit Myanmar
Several days after the earthquake, the South African Department of International Relations confirmed that one citizen was among the deceased.
It said around a dozen other nationals had been accounted for, adding that the South African embassy in Bangkok was providing consular services to them.
But Hunsraj says trying to get emergency travel documents from the consulate was a difficult process that added to the trauma.
"We had to go via the British embassy in Yangon because there was no South African embassy in Myanmar.
So, we had to do an ETD [Emergency Travel Document] as a British citizen [but] that was futile. We had to pay a hundred pounds, after losing everything, for an ETD that we did not use."
Hunsraj says it took days of pressure through authorities at her school to eventually get the correct paperwork.
READ: Bluff family ‘keeping faith’ for missing son in Myanmar
"We spoke to the guy from the embassy in Bangkok and we said to him the 18th [of April] is too far out - can he try to do something to get the dates moved closer?
Then he did an ETC [Emergency Travel Certificate] from Bangkok, which is the actual document we needed.
He managed to send it to the school and the school then got us flights on the 16th of April. We got here [South Africa] the next day."
Hunsraj flew out of Myanmar with a fellow teacher from Durban several weeks after the earthquake.
She says arriving home was an emotional moment.
"We were running through the gates [at the airport]. It was a mixture of joy and sorrow. I had my friends and family waiting at the airport.
"The immigration officer said to us, 'you've been through such a traumatic experience, leave your ETC with us and go'. It was for the first time in that whole journey that we knew we were back home."
Now back in Durban, Hunsraj is recovering from the ordeal with the support of her family and says she’s grateful to be alive.
Her daughter, Thiasha Narainsamy, had been desperately trying to help get her mother home.
Hunsraj says the experience has completely changed her outlook on life.
"I am very frugal when it comes to spending money, especially on frivolous things.
But when I was at the airport, I bought a chocolate for R400."
She says when people asked her why she was spending so much on chocolate she replied that you don't know what tomorrow holds.
"You just have to go with what you feel at the time and just do it. This experience has changed the way I think and do things."
In Myanmar, recovery efforts are continuing more than a month on from the earthquake.
According to the Red Cross, it might take two years to get life there back to some sort of normality.
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LISTEN BELOW: Newswatch's interview with Devika Hunsraj
