‘I ate ketchup and cheese’: Twelve-year-old Venezuelan rescued after 32 hours under quake rubble

Karina Blanco was about to start the spinning class she was teaching when the world began to shake. As the tremors grew stronger, she grabbed her bag and ran outside with everyone else.

“When I realized the magnitude of the incident, I started screaming ‘my girl, my girl’. I got in my car and drove as fast as I could,” Karina said.

Her only daughter, 12-year-old Fabiana, was at home when two powerful earthquakes shook Venezuela seconds apart on June 24. The second earthquake had a magnitude of 7.5 and was one of the strongest earthquakes to occur in the country in the last century.

Karina couldn’t believe her eyes when she arrived at her building in Caraballeda, in the northern province of La Guaira. “I could see a building, then a gap where my building was, and then another building.”

Fabiana was in her mother’s bedroom when she felt the earthquakes in their flat on the first floor of the 10-storey building. He ran into the kitchen and was holding on to the counter when the walls collapsed around him. He was thrown to the ground.

“I saw things shaking, falling, breaking, and then the walls cracking. The wall separating my apartment from a friend’s apartment collapsed. At that moment I thought, ‘I’m going to die. I won’t survive this. No one will save me,'” Fabiana said.

From that moment on, an excruciating 32 hours began.

Outside the collapsed building, Karina saw half of her daughter’s bed sticking out of the rubble.

“I was running from one end of the complex to the other screaming, ‘He’s dead. My daughter is dead.’ I didn’t know what to do,” Karina said.

Everything was quiet under the collapsed building for Fabiana. He was lying face up, covered in rubble, with the ceiling almost touching his face.

“I am a very anxious and claustrophobic person. But I don’t know why, a strange calm came over me. Maybe my mind was in shock,” he said.

After a while, a nurse who was babysitting her neighbors upstairs started calling out to see if anyone could hear her. Fabiana replied.

“He told me to calm down and that everything would be okay,” Fabiana said.

The nurse was rescued around midnight, six hours after the earthquake. He told the volunteers who took him out that a girl named Fabiana lived inside.

“I surrendered to God, asking for the strength to start a new life without Fabiana. Then someone said to me: ‘Your daughter is alive,'” Karina said.

She ran back into the building, screaming into gaps in the rubble and screaming her daughter’s name.