From among endless rubble of adobe and round wooden beams, twisted and silent, scattered on top of a mountain dotted with olive trees, Rachida pears hunched over. This dark-skinned woman, about 50 years old, gives up searching.
And he breaks down crying, and hugs himself and can’t stop. Her father Brahim is underneath, he is dead, she claims. The only sound that comes out of the rubble, which forms a continuous path linking one house to another, is the cry of a goat caught on a beam, cincreasingly distant and distanced.
His father, Brahim, lived in Tafagajt, a quiet village located a few kilometers from the epicenter of the earthquake that shook several regions of Morocco last Friday. In reality, we have to talk about Tafagajt in the past tense, because there is nothing left. All the buildings – around a hundred – have fallen, only a solitary wall survives here and there. And with them, its inhabitants.
Hassan, a neighbor, He says that there were about 400 residents in the village.. The earthquake buried a hundred, one in four. There is no family that tragedy does not hit hard.
“I do not have anything”, says Rachida inconsolable alongside a neighbor with her husband in the hospital. They’ve stopped trying to find Brahim. “He’s under there,” she summarizes, looking toward an area of rubble with a standing wall.
A few meters from them, in a small field next to another demolished building, the pace is frenetic. Next to some old tombs, about twenty men, shovel in hand, dig new holes to bury the corpses. They build a row of elongated holes and, in parallel, another row of bodies wrped in blankets and shrouds waits. At one end, small groups of women, men, and children console each other under a tree. They hug, cry, look without seeing.
Pain
The pain weighs. It is summed up by an Austrian boy who has gone from Marrakech to help and carries stones taken from the rubble to make up the grave. “Very intense,” he says between walks, while in the background a woman shouts “My father! My father!” She clinging to a body, along with her two brothers. He is the next to be buried.
Tafagajt is reached by a white dirt road that climbs a mountain from the town of Amizmiz, with 14,000 inhabitants, where everyone knows that many have died up there, still carrying their own death. Dozens of people from the neighboring town have also died. and the health center is overflowing with wounded people and corpses.
In Tafagajt, its inhabitants lived as they could from livestock and subsistence agriculture, explains Hassan, but there is a drought and the olive trees do not produce olives. “We have three hours of water a day from a well that the city council built,” he says.
Video
In the video from the security cameras you can see how a man runs while everything collses behind him.
Now they also have the tanker truck brought by the Moroccan Army, whose soldiers look for human traces among the fallen adobe and distribute food.
Somehow it is assumed that there can be no more survivors, but as they leave the village a group of three women shout “Salam aleikun!” several times he made a small hole in the rubble of a large house that had completely collsed.
– Is there anyone among the stones?
Source: Clarin
