A British-Syrian community leader is organising donations for Syrians after being “worried sick” when she heard her 87-year-old father had to sleep in his car after the earthquake hit. Lena Baurak, 57, from Nottingham, a board member at Scan UK (Syrian Charities and Associations Network UK), said her father had been living in a fourth-floor apartment in Latakia, Syria, when the earthquake struck.
The UN has reported a death toll of about 6,000 for all of Syria after the deadly earthquake, including 4,400 in the rebel-held north west. “When the earthquake happened, my dad and my stepmother woke up in terror and tried to rush outside of their apartment in fear that the whole building would collapse,” Ms Baurak told the PA news agency.
“They live on the fourth floor and they were petrified that they were not going to make it in time, and they will be trapped under the rubble if, God forbid, their building had collapsed because of my dad’s slow movement as he is 87-years-old. But thankfully, somehow, they managed to escape their building and drove their car to an area in Latakia where they felt safer because there were less high-rises around.
