When Zeynab Mohammad heard a loud commotion from inside her ground-floor shop at the East Lee building in Eastleigh on Friday, 23 October, she assumed it was nothing more than a neighbourhood quarrel.
She stayed put. Moments later, the 18-storey structure crumbled around her, and her world shrank to the narrow gap between two fridges.
“I did not know the building was collapsing when I heard noises, so I stayed inside and then it collapsed and I was trapped inside,” she recalled.
With concrete and rubble pressing in on all sides, Zeynab had nothing but darkness, dust, and the weight of uncertainty.
“Around me were stones; I just prayed to God that if it was my time to go then he should let me rest in peace,” she said.
A short distance away in the same rubble, Victor Onyango, a tailor who operated a shop nearby, was fighting his own battle for survival.
How Zeynab and Onyango survived 30 hours in rubble
The two found each other through the wreckage, not physically, but through their voices, calling out and responding across the debris for more than 30 hours. Onyango credits that connection with keeping him alive.
“We were talking and telling each other God was with us, we encouraged each other until the last minute when I saw a bit of light. I was rescued first and then I told the men that there was someone else down there,” he said.
Dehydration was a very real threat in those desperate hours. Onyango said he very nearly resorted to drinking his own urine before he remembered the fridge in his shop.
He managed to stretch his arm through the debris and retrieve a bottle of water and a soda. He poured the water over his head to cool down and drank the soda, then urged Zeynab to check whether she had a fridge of her own nearby and encouraged her to do the same to stay alive.
By Saturday evening, roughly 30 hours after the collapse, rescuers pulled both survivors from the rubble, battered but breathing.
Their ordeal, sustained by whispered encouragement and a chance reach into a fridge, stands as one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from the Eastleigh disaster.
