TEHRAN -- Who could imagine that 1990 Brazil v Scotland football match would have survived thousands of people in a faraway country?

However no one watched the play to the end in Iran’s northern province of Guilan. An earthquake with a moment magnitude of 7.4 devastated northern cities of Rudbar and Manjil in the middle of match.

Many fans that followed the 1990 World Cup did not sleep to watch the match in midnight so they were awake when the earth began shaking.

The earthquake killed approximately 40,000 people, left more than 500,000 homeless, destroyed three cities of Rudbar, Manjil, and Lowshan and 700 villages, and slightly damaged another 300 villages, in the densely populated area of the western Alborz Mountains, southwest of the Caspian Sea.

I was a little girl when the Rudbar-Manjil earthquake happened on June 20, 1990. However there are still images and senses, which bring me back to the event.

Cracks on the walls, paraffin lamps and people wrapped in blankets all revive the sense of a disaster, a hazard which can surprise you every now and then for me.

In 1990s, we lived in Lahijan, an Iranian’s northern city and I was a child who thought that the earth is always firm beneath her feet.

The first scene that I recalled from that time is my father, who was a football fan, holing me tight in his arms passing the staircase and that horrible uncontrollable shakings.

My family was alright as well as our neighbors. After some minutes, when all our neighbors took refuge in the streets there was all fun for children.

All my playmates were there and no one prohibited us from running and screaming in midnight. My lovely grandma, who was our guest, could not return to her home in Tehran since the road was destroyed after the earthquake. That was great!

After a week, we went to Rasht, the center of Guilan Province. Oh My God! The Clock Tower of Rasht’s Municipality, the tallest building I’ve ever seen during my short life, was collapsed.

You never know how the world can be distrustful for a child when the most giant and steadiest things she knows ruin before her eyes.

However no sign, no sense does not recall the joyful part of those days for me but my heart raced whenever I hear a news about an earthquake in each and every part of the world.

I always think of children who are not as lucky as me, about the nights which are deceitfully calm and do not disturbed without any football match to wake people up and about the hopes and desires, which are buried under debris in minutes.

An earthquake is not a short-term catastrophe. It exactly begins after the original jolt, leaving survivors who wished to die with their dears.

Once in a meeting, the director of Cultural Heritage and Tourism Research Center Seyyed Mohammad Beheshti said that in past time “people used to live between two natural disasters, they were in harmony with their surrounding nature but nowadays people underestimate the power of nature.”

He is right. We disregard nature as a great power, which is generous and brutal at times. In this way, the little girl of those days sympathizes with earth, which tolerates our unkindness and apathy every now and then.

The beautiful city of Rudbar was reconstructed on the skirt of Alborz Mountain. The blue sky and marvelous gardens of olive trees show that the nature recompense bitter days.

However my heart goes out with all people whose hearts shake during earthquakes in every part of the world; for whom the earth under their feet is not stable anymore!

PHOTO: A collection of personal images after Manjil-Rudbar Earthquake of 1990 (Photo: images.persianblog.ir)