The old man Brike leans on a thick stick as a cane so as not to lose his balance and fall on top of his house. His whole life is under his feet. He hesitantly advances between a mountain of stones from which pieces of clothing, wooden beams, twisted pots or colored plastic stick out. His house sits on top of an ocean of rocks that were once stone houses and alleys and are now nothing, just devastation. Brike endures his grief and, for lack of words, points to a torn yellow mattress still half covered with rocks that is a few meters below. There, under his feet, on top of the bed, was his entire life: his wife. “Yamna was sleeping and her roof fell on top of her. We took it right out of there.” Brike wanders with a lost soul over the remains of his house with his two daughters Fotma and Jamila, who wear the same thing, a dark blue djellaba, but act differently. Jamila looks for clothes among the stones and when she finds an item of clothing, he carefully folds it and places it in a pile. Fotma just cries. With the Moroccan Atlas Mountains in the background, Fotma is sitting on top of the ruins next to everything they have been able to recover from her life: three black suitcases, a pot, three silver teapots and a green box with six miraculously whole crystal glasses.
Neither of the two women can speak, so Brike asks to speak again and for the first time her voice does not tremble, as if anger had made a pact with her temper. “There were people alive! On Saturday we found survivors, my wife Yamna was breathing!, but since no ambulance came, all the injured died little by little. Until Sunday, no one from the Government came and they only came to count the dead, then they left.” They counted 35 deaths, and in the neighboring village, 84 more. Fotma listens to her father, covers her face with her hands and cries even more.
The village of Anerni illustrates a universal maxim in a catastrophe: slowness kills. Government apathy and forgetfulness, too. When yesterday marked 72 hours since the earthquake in Morocco, the limit of time that the majority of trapped victims survived under the rubble, dozens of affected villages still did not receive any help.
The latest death toll stands at 2,862 dead and 2,562 injured. And there are probably many left to tell. Until yesterday, construction of a military camp began on the outskirts of Amizmiz, the main city at the foot of the mountains and 56 kilometers south of Marrakech, to coordinate national and international aid. Spanish firefighters, who yesterday were waiting for orders in Amizmiz, where the Military Emergency Unit of the Spanish Army also arrived, admitted to this newspaper that it is already too late to find many people alive. “The majority of demolished houses – a firefighter explained to this newspaper yesterday – are made of stone and one story, which makes it more difficult to create holes or air pockets where the victims can resist.” Four days after the earthquake, Morocco continues to only accept aid from Spain, the United Kingdom, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. No one else's.
The village of Anerni accumulates all the sins that deserve government indifference. With just 120 houses, it is a town of humble farmers and shepherds at the end of a narrow and impossible white sand road more than an hour by car from Amizmiz. Truly impossible: as soon as the road crosses the town of Azgour, where there are dozens of fallen buildings and even the mosque has cracked, it is impossible to pass. A landslide prevents passage in a narrow bend next to a cliff and you can only continue on foot. But it can.
After half an hour of walking, the solitude of the village of Anerni, which is like that of dozens or hundreds of towns in the region, shows the reality of forgotten places. The neighbors are in charge of dealing with their own despair. If at the entrance to the town there are dozens of families on the grassy esplanades or under the shade of the fig trees, as you climb the hill and observe the cataclysm, it is the neighbors who try to recover the bodies of their loved ones with their hands. buried.
At the foot of several fallen houses, now a mash of stones and broken wood, a group of men share two pickaxes and a shovel to find the body of Saida Ait Aali. They take turns sharing the effort so they can catch their breath. The woman is under the stones, but they don't know where, so they are guided in the only way that death allows: by smell. One of them kneels, puts his nose to the ground and guides the others from the stench of the decomposing body emanating from the stones. “She's over here,” he says. And the others continue digging as fast as they can.
They have another clue: not far away was the body of her husband, Hassan Ben Aabou, so she can't be far away. It is impossible to be guided by any other reference such as a door or a window, because the entire house is reduced to stones. The stable must have been in one corner, because under a pile of rubble, there is a donkey braying desperately.
Mohamed Ait Hamed waits for his neighbors to find Saida because he does not have the strength to dig. In addition to Saida, his sister-in-law, the earthquake killed his mother and his brother. Hamed was in Casablanca and that saved him. He does not understand, he refuses to understand, how it could be that he got there from so far before the Government's help. "Nobody has shown up! Small villages like this are always the most forgotten in disasters like this. It's not fair. As soon as I saw what had happened, I came here in a hurry. “We have to take out our dead and bury them, it is inhumane.”
The stones that block the path to Anerni seem like an excuse to Hamed. “Of course it is difficult to get here with the road blocked, but there is the army, the firefighters, someone. If we had acted sooner, lives could have been saved.” Next to him, Ali Aladib also lights up. "We are waiting. When will they come? If they arrive now it is already too late. “Every minute that passes is too late.”
For Zahra and her 4-year-old baby Ahmed, it sure is. They were found yesterday morning in the rubble, still hugging. Old Laarbi, who wears a white, half-torn djellaba, explains the scene with a twisted grimace on his lips. “When the earthquake occurred, the woman had to hug her son to protect him and the stones fell on top of her. At six in the morning they were able to remove her body and then they removed the child's body, who was still breathing but was badly injured. He died shortly after.”
Again, at the top of the hill of rubble, the elderly Brike receives a call that connects him to the outside for the first time. He has turned on the coverage and his grandson calls to see how they are. When he tells her that his grandmother is dead, he hears a scream on the other end of the line. Before hanging up, the grandfather tells his grandson that he has to keep looking. He wants to find his family's documentation, he says, before it rains and ruins everything.
As we leave the village of Anerni on foot, belated help appears at the end of the road: an excavator has removed the stones from the road and a stream of cars, vans and ambulances is heading towards the town. A boy on a motorcycle leads the procession and makes gestures with his hand for them to follow him, as if his gesture infected his haste. He is the only one with enthusiasm. Absolutely no one in the village reacts. There is no cheering, no applause or gestures of relief. Help is finally coming, that's all. Late.
