Anna Foster on the Turkey earthquake disaster

He must only have been about six or seven. The little boy’s face grinned out from the photo in my hand, his dark brown hair neatly brushed. Somebody clearly loved this picture. With a neat frame carefully hand-made from coloured lolly sticks and silver stickers, it belonged in a special place. Instead, it lay in the mud. Towering above, a pile of twisted metal and smashed concrete was all that remained of the home it came from.

It’s tough to find the right words to describe the scale of the devastation in Southern Turkey. Tens of thousands died where they lay, asleep in their beds. Because the earthquake happened in the night, there wasn’t time to flee. As floor upon floor of buildings crashed down to the ground, most people didn’t stand a chance.

I was one of the first journalists to arrive at the epicentre of the quake in Kahramanmaras. I’d managed to get the very last seat on a lunchtime flight to Adana. But there was a problem. Bad weather and cancelled flights across Turkey meant the rest of my team wouldn’t arrive until the late the following day. There was a choice to make.

One of my early jobs in journalism was with Radio 1 Newsbeat. There, we always worked by ourselves in the field. I’d even embedded solo with British troops in Iraq. Now, just like back then, I was ready to go it alone.

Zeynep, our producer in Istanbul, made sure I had one travelling companion. Lightning quick she’d booked me a taxi, and my driver Berkan was there to meet me at the airport as I landed. Zeynep and I had worked together in Ukraine, and I trust her judgement completely.

Berkan and I became a team. We gathered what we needed – water, food, a full tank of diesel – and headed for the centre of the disaster zone.

It was a challenge. The roads were cracked and broken, and the main highway was closed. The only alternative was a winding mountain route.

At times like this, you need to be right at the heart of the story. And because we became stuck fast in the same traffic jam as the convoys of search and rescue teams and ambulances, I saw first-hand that aid was taking too long to arrive.

When we arrived at the epicentre I could tell our audiences, with confidence, that the death toll was rising rapidly – because I was watching the bodies being brought out of the buildings.

Nothing can prepare you for those moments. At one recovery site, I watched as a man’s body was carefully removed from the rubble and wrapped in a patterned blanket. His son sagged to his knees, and as the realisation of his father’s death hit he let out an anguished howl. It was loud and raw and filled with pain. I can still hear it now.

I’ve covered stories of heartbreaking desperation before. Ebola in Sierra Leone, famine in South Sudan, families fleeing ISIS in Iraq. This was my first earthquake.

But like the other assignments, I found it was the smallest, most personal details that hit the hardest. Standing among a group of families waiting for news of their loved ones I saw a women reach towards one of the rescuers. He handed her a small pink make-up bag, and she tucked it under her arm, sobbing. It was a sign they were getting close to the body of her daughter.

I’ve thought of my own children often this week, especially at moments like that. A child-sized body bag being carefully carried to a waiting coffin, or a plastic toy lying in the rubble are painful reminders of the grief that so many parents here are experiencing.

Working in an earthquake zone means living alongside the people whose stories you’re there to tell. Right now, they’re facing some of the toughest conditions you could imagine. Hotels, shops and restaurants are closed. Petrol station kiosks are swept clean of food.

Staying warm is a huge priority – southern Turkey in February is bitterly cold. Every street has a fire glowing at night, and I watched people pulling wood out of the wreckage to burn. While waiting to report I was often drawn to the flames too, and we all warmed our hands together.

Not too long ago, bulky, expensive satellite dishes were the only way to broadcast. Now you can do it from a phone, as long as you can find a precious scrap of signal. If the conditions are right, you can get on air in under a minute.

I filmed videos and sent them off on Whatsapp for talented colleagues back in London to edit together into TV reports. If you watched me live on the BBC Ten o’clock news in those first few days I was holding my phone in my hand, filming myself.

I showed Berkan how to shine his phone torch on to my face to light me in the dark. It worked, and it meant we got to share the story with audiences around the world. That made the couple of hours sleep in the freezing car afterwards worthwhile.

Many of the images you’ll have seen on the news are heartbreaking. They show suffering on a scale so huge it’s hard to comprehend. But they also show the very best of humanity.

The moment when rescue workers shush a waiting crowd because they’ve heard the sound of possible survivors is electric. Watching them clamber over the unstable ruins, risking their lives to try and save someone else’s, sparks hope. A child freed from the wreckage is a moment of joy.

Sadly, miracles rescues end, with only the dead left to bury. The next step is to rebuild devastated communities and try to piece shattered lives back together, but it won’t be easy. Many Turks believe their hardest days are the ones still ahead.