The elderly Zahra Ben Brik raises her henna-orange hands and cries with the despair of the forgotten. Eighteen members of her family have died after their stone houses fell on them in Tafgarte, a rural area in the Atlas Mountains, south of Marrakech, where barely a house remains standing.
The scene is desolate. Dozens of demolished houses are scattered along the mountainside and everywhere there are doors, bicycles or sofas covered in dust and stones, as if they had been blown away by a gas explosion. Zahra wipes her eyes with her hands but surrenders again to a slow, high-pitched sob. “No one has come to help us, I am old and I don't have the strength, a neighbor helps me remove stones one by one so that he can find my family and bury them. I have lost everything and I am alone, what is going to happen to me?
The earthquake that shook Morocco last Friday, the worst in its history with at least 2,012 deaths and 2,059 injuries, 1,400 seriously, has hit especially poor and rural areas of the country. In Tafgarte, a village of just 120 houses at the end of a narrow, winding road, more than 80 people have died. On the esplanades, between olive trees and dry bushes, there are dozens of families waiting on rugs for some unknown purpose.
Thirty-six hours after the earthquake, no one from the government has come to help them. Only a handful of civilian volunteers from Amizmiz, the village at the foot of the mountain, have brought up any food and blankets. In Tafgarte the most urgent thing is shops and food, because everyone has lost everything. Some neighbors wander around disoriented and a man with a blue cap who speaks broken English because he acted as a tourist guide when he was young repeats over and over again: “This is like Iraq! This is like Iraq” ("This is like Iraq"). Nobody pays much attention to him.
Neighbor Brahim Mazahar has not stopped removing stones with his hands since the earthquake. He has blood on his fingertips and the dust from it whitens his arm up to the elbow. He also has deeper, more invisible wounds: guilt has been gnawing at him since Friday. He had just finished praying with his wife and his daughter and they were preparing to pray when they noticed a terrible tremor, as if the earth roared and turned like a dragon. “I was wrong, I told them to wait inside the house because stones were raining outside and the house couldn't hold up. It fell on them. “He thought he protected them and now they are both dead.”
Every turn down any broken alley in Tafgarte, littered with stones and rubble, has the same soundtrack of cries from women and men who have lost everything and wait by the ruins of their home. The scene of disaster and oblivion in rural areas also has a smell: it is hot and the stench of decomposing bodies begins to emanate from between the stones. At the end of a hillside where before there were dozens of houses and now only destruction, Mohamed pushes aside some stones with a lost look. He is looking for his 76-year-old father, who was sleeping when the house fell on him.
Mohamed says he has no hope of finding him alive. “The dust of the adobe drowns the few who survived under the stones. In this village there is no one alive under the stones.”
