Zulaija Nieto, a Sevillana in the earthquake in Mexico

A day after my arrival, on September 19, 2017, they announced as breaking news, a new earthquake in Mexico City.
Once again I had nothing left to say but Alhamdulillah.
On the night of September 7, 2017, an earthquake, with a magnitude of 8.4 on the Richter scale, shook southern Mexico reaching the capital.
At that precise moment I was in San Cristóbal de las Casas, calmly ready to sleep, like the rest of the population, when we began to feel a slight tremor that increased little by little.
Everything happened very quickly, I only remember seeing the windows shake and running to warn my partner who had already gone to bed.
Suddenly he was out of the house.
The ground was moving, alarms were heard, dogs, but the most shocking of all were seeing colored lights in the sky.
I felt different sensations since it was beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
The shaking lasted about three minutes, but I felt it for only a few seconds.
When everything calmed down, we met with the rest of the people closest to us, surprisingly I was not afraid.
Once we checked that we were all okay, Sheikh Nafia Perez indicated that we should stay a while longer to do Dhikr.
That was something that definitely calmed my heart and allowed me to rest the night, even though everyone was still uneasy about aftershocks.
The next day we became aware of the damage that had occurred due to the earthquake, and a couple of days later, the Muslim Community of Mexico in Chiapas organized a trip to bring humanitarian aid to Juchitán de Zaragoza, a Mexican city located in the southeast of the state of Oaxaca.
There were three cars that participated in the expedition.
The trip consisted of visiting the most affected places, where we were able to experience how hundreds of people had become homeless and therefore were staying in shelters.
Entire families in the streets, sheltered under small plastic tarpaulins and using the few pieces of furniture they had been able to salvage from the rubble.
The following days we dedicated ourselves to getting supplies that were necessary for the population such as toilet paper, canned food and food that were not perishable, to later distribute them.
It was many hours by car and resting as much as necessary, but it was all worth it.
Seeing the smile that those people offered you, who, from one moment to the next, had lost everything, is priceless.
What surprised me the most during the trip was the hospitality and immense gratitude we received both from the authorities and from the affected people themselves.
In these situations it is easy to enter a state of panic and despair, however, that place breathed calm between the continuous aftershocks, which occurred almost every ten minutes, and the rubble of the city.
Once in Seville, remembering the events, I stop to think about what was that certainty of security that made me not go into a state of shock on the night of the earthquake and that was the company.
And that company is that of the Fuqara.
Zulaija Nieto Jiménez, Seville, 20 September 2017.