How to hide from kids… Children in Turkey who were left homeless by last week’s powerful earthquakes are learning to manage what happened to them and their anxiety about the aftershocks by playing a new game with their bricks, the “earthquake”, as a teacher explained.

“They are discussing the earthquake. They build with their bricks and ask… can it withstand earthquakes, is it stable?” said Bousra Živelek, who has undertaken to look after 22 children in an improvised “school room”, on a ferryboat that was converted into a clinic and shelter, in the port of Alexandretta (Iskenderun).

Children also play with fire trucks. “They say: we have to go fast” in the earthquake area.

The dead from the disaster in Turkey and Syria are exceeding the 41,000, and millions of other people they are in need of humanitarian assistance after being left homeless and have no way to meet their basic needs.

Hashibe Embrou, a psychiatrist who works on the ferry, said some people cry a lot, others have trouble sleeping. “I tell (survivors) that what they are experiencing is normal and that their symptoms will gradually subside once they are in a safe environment. This really calms them down. They are relieved to learn that they are not crazy, that they are actually sane, and that this is something that any human would experience. We watch them all day,” explained.

“The long-term consequences for the mental health of these people will only become apparent after it has passed some time, because everyone deals with shock differently,” Ebru added.

Doctors say they are seeing more and more patients with post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks. For survivors, the trauma they experience is immense. Some were pulled from the wreckage after hours in the cold and darkness. And when they came out they learned that their own people were killed or missing and that their neighborhood was turned into a pile of rubble…