In Hatay’s once thriving market district of cafes, shops and homes, the debris-strewn streets are lined with piles of twisted steel beams and crumbled brick.

The belongings of the living and the dead are scattered among the rubble in a cruel mosaic of a natural disaster, and the early April heat makes the hint of concrete dust hang in the air.

The region was devastated in February by a powerful earthquake that killed more than 56,000 people, left 2.5 million homeless and millions more in need of humanitarian aid.

In a refugee camp on the grounds of a university in Kahramanmaras, a mother who lost three young children in the disaster runs a clothes bank almost 24/7 to support those around her, but also as a means to forget for a while and not be left alone with the thoughts of the deaths of her family.

Teacher Huda Tarsuslu Yolcu gives English lessons to some of the 1,000 children who attend class in tents in Orhanli camp.

Her son is eight, and she begins crying as she explains that his teacher died in the earthquake, but she can’t bring herself to tell him the truth. She has told him he has gone to live in another part of Turkey, and when her son asks to call him, she says he lost his phone in the quake.

“This is just one story of heartbreak,” she says as she wipes away her tears. “There are millions of these stories.”

Sister and brother Selva (6) and Hasan Celik (3) are playing around their mother, Yasmin, in the camp as she recounts the terror of a five-hour bare-hands search through the rubble of their apartment building looking for her children.

Luckily, Selva and Hasan were found alive and relatively unscathed and are in good spirits, but the psychological scars will remain for a long time.

Yasmin said the earthquake hit so quickly she didn’t even have time to grab her children from their room before they became lost in the dust and destruction.

“I had just tucked my children into bed and locked the bedroom door, so when it happened I could not get to them because the door was locked. They were then lost underneath the rubble for five hours and it was absolutely terrifying,” said Yasmin, who is a Syrian refugee.

Many of the survivors who spoke with the Irish Independent said that, initially, it felt like a thunderstorm had hit, but they soon realised the earth was shifting violently beneath their feet and destroying everything around them.

One woman recalled how she ran for her life from her apartment building and said “the doorway was no longer where it should have been”, such was the violence of the shaking.

The earthquake caused destruction over an area larger than Germany and levelled nearly 200,000 buildings. The true death toll will not be known for some time as the thousands of tremors following the main earthquakes have made rescue efforts precarious.

Many people in the region live in high-rise apartment blocks. Those buildings that haven’t collapsed could come crashing down in the next minor tremor.

A significant population of the affected region in Turkey are either Syrian refugees fleeing war or have fled the region to live with family and friends in other parts of Turkey. This renders any official number of missing people incalculable for now.

The first earthquake that struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6 registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, the most powerful earthquake to strike Turkey since 1939. It was quickly followed by a 7.7 quake.

Combine this with the heavily-populated area in which it struck and the quake’s shallow depth, plus the fact it hit at around 4am when most people were asleep and it clear it was a recipe for disaster.

While the Richter scale measures the magnitude of the earthquake, the Mercalli intensity scale measures the violence of the shaking and the damage levels on the surface.

The scale ranges from one to 12, one being the lowest intensity and 12 being the highest. The earthquake in Turkey was 12 and designated “extreme”.

This is applied to earthquakes in which structures are destroyed, the ground itself is torn and cracked and other natural disasters, such as landslides or tsunamis, are initiated.

“Damage is total. Waves are seen on ground surfaces. Lines of sight and level are distorted. Objects are thrown upward into the air,” is the description given to this intensity.

“Damage is total” is the most succinct way of describing what the 16 million affected people faced that night.

One of the largest humanitarian efforts in the world is now under way in the region. At the start, teams were focused on rescue efforts for the thousands trapped under the rubble. More than 120,000 people were also injured, putting the region’s hospital system under severe pressure.

Many were rescued alive days after the quakes, some having gone a week without food or water as they were trapped under the rubble.

Unicef staff in Turkey told the Irish Independent of a young boy they met who was pulled alive from the rubble holding his pet bird after more than 120 hours alone in the darkness.

The UN’s relief agency, along with its other charitable partners in the region, has done monumental work in the past eight weeks. 

Volunteers have tended to more than 2.5 million children who are in need of clothing, food, clean water, medical attention, vaccination and, crucially, psychological and psychosocial support.

“Psychosocial help is as important for the children as food or air to breathe. It is our number one focus,” said Sema Hosta, the head of Unicef Turkey’s communications.

There are counselling sessions available for the children affected by the disaster to train them to recognise negative emotions following the earthquake and how to deal with them.

“We ask the children to describe how they are feeling when they are happy and where in their body they feel it. We do the same when they are feeling sad. It helps them to identify and process the emotions,” Ms Hosta said.

Nowhere was the psychological trauma to children more evident than in the village of Incirli, near the epicentre of the earthquake, to the north-west of the city of Gaziantep.

Incirli was fortunate in that none of its residents were killed, but the lasting effects are still being felt.

The villagers are all too aware of their lucky escape, as just kilometres up the road more than 600 people died in one village that was on the fault line.

The children have told their parents and school principal they are too afraid to go into big buildings any more, so they are now being taught in tents in the school’s playground.

While the initial earthquakes sparked terror in all who felt their effects, the thousands of tremors felt afterwards have served to keep those who have remained in the region in a constant state of fear of what could happen again at any moment.

Most of the teachers in that school have not returned to work yet as they lived in nearby Nurdagi city, which was almost wiped off the map, so parents and government ministry volunteers are now taking lessons while teachers can find somewhere new to live.

The earthquakes affected the lives of nearly four million schoolchildren, including 350,000 refugee and migrant children.

Nearly 1.5 million have resumed their education in earthquake-affected areas, with 250,000 going to classes after relocating elsewhere. However, many others have not yet regained full access to learning, with formal schooling in the most affected provinces still reopening.

In Kahramanmaras, a city comparable in size to Dublin, children were seen sifting through the rubble of apartment buildings, looking for their belongings. An elderly woman sat on a chair overlooking a vast chasm that once contained the foundation of her apartment block as diggers gathered rubble.

Tents lined the roads throughout an area that spans hundreds of kilometres. While thousands live in structured settlements, others have refused to leave their patch of land and instead put up government-issued tarpaulin tents where their homes once stood.

This tented sprawl speckles the mountainous landscape of the region, revealing the widespread effects of an earthquake that is believed to be the second-most expensive ever in terms of damage, at over €100bn.

Unicef has launched an appeal to cover the €180m it needs to provide humanitarian assistance to the nine million people in desperate need in Turkey alone.

Some aid has also made its way to Syria, where the effect of the earthquake is not fully known, given the flimsy nature of the information available from the Assad regime. The reality is that nobody but those on the ground in Aleppo and other areas in northern Syria know the true extent of the damage and suffering.

Unicef Ireland executive director Peter Power said families, and children in particular, have been traumatised by what they have been through in the past two months.

“The extent of the devastation is enormous, it really is hard to comprehend,” said Mr Power. 

“Nine million people, almost double the population of Ireland, are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. The equivalent of almost half the population of Ireland, 2.3 million people, are living in tented accommodation.

“The figures are just enormous here and it’s clear this is going to require a very coordinated response to this. Unicef will be playing its part, providing humanitarian aid to families and children for months, and perhaps years to come.”

As the dust settles on this tragedy and people try to return to normality, their sadness and grief are turning to anger and frustration.

The random nature of the destruction of some buildings while others sustained only minor damage is likely to be a bone of contention for a great number of residents.

Many of the most affected cities including Hatay, Kahramanmaras and Nurdagi are on or near the East Anatolian fault line, which has experienced four earthquakes in the past 25 years.

This has left many wondering why construction standards seem to be so low in the region.

The Turkish justice ministry has arrested more than 200 people for alleged poor building practices after identifying more than 600 “suspects”. Many of those 600 died in the earthquake.

Experts have been warning for years that corruption within the industry has led to unsafe building practices. Many of the collapsed buildings were “pancaked” – when storeys compress and collapse one after the other from the top down. Total collapses like these are usually avoided in well-constructed buildings, even after a powerful earthquake.

During a recent visit to the region, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to lay the blame for the extent of the disaster largely on fate, saying: “Such things have always happened. It’s part of destiny’s plan.”

With an election next month and more than a sixth of the population directly affected by the earthquake, many of them blaming the government for poor regulations leading to excess destruction, Erdogan may be about to experience destiny’s plan for himself.​

Unicef has set a fundraising goal of €180m, and so far has reached only 30pc of its target. If you wish to donate to the earthquake appeal, you can do so at Unicef.ie