16 Sep 2023 at 05:00
They are devastated and in shock, they have lost everything. In some villages in the Moroccan Atlas there are no houses left standing. Abandoned pickaxes mark the places where their dead loved ones lay. The aftershocks keep coming and the freezing winter is coming.
“Everything will be fine, except for me! Everyone will get a home soon, except me! There is a doctor for everyone, except me!” He has been shouting the same thing continuously for an hour, after his mind broke and he started crying in his emergency tent.
The short, stocky man – late thirties, early forties – shakes off one fellow villager after another who has rushed over. He pushes another man in the chest, while his posture suggests that a punch may follow. Then he suddenly embraces him, pulls away and does exactly the same to a third and a fourth man.
Eventually he runs into his badly damaged home and then appears on the roof. He climbs onto the cement blocks on the edge and raises his fist in the air. It looks like he’s going to jump.
Matthijs le Loux is a foreign reporter for NU.nl
Matthijs follows major international news events for NU.nl, such as the war in Ukraine and the American elections. He is currently in Morocco with our camera journalist Bas Scharwachter to report on the earthquake.
Trot to trot to trot
Shortly before, Marouane (32) and Salim (33) guide the NU.nl reporter through what is left of Toulkine, a remote village at an altitude of over 1,700 meters, 80 kilometers southwest of Marrakesh. We are very close to the epicenter of the earthquake.
Seven of the approximately one hundred residents lost their lives. Aftershocks are the order of the day. “Yesterday we had two,” says Marouane. “First there is a sound like a heavy truck passing by. Then comes the movement: the ground becomes like the waves of the sea and it is as if you are being pushed forward.”
Marouane lives in Casablanca, but this is where his ancestors come from and many of the residents are related. Salim, also from Casablanca, has never been here before, but after the quake he did not hesitate to travel south with his friend to help.
There is plenty to do. The two set out the plans for the construction of a new mosque, dig latrines, plan the move of the village’s only shop to a tent and try to arrange for a man with serious injuries to his face and legs to finally be taken to a hospital. transported. On Wednesday evening they even organized a film screening in the open air. “For the children,” says Salim. “Because that is also very important.”
Marouane looks at the collapsed mosque, from which he has to free the imam’s chair. Photo: Matthijs le Loux
‘The emptiness makes me the saddest’
Marouane, a bear of a guy, radiates calm and decisiveness, but beneath the surface it is swirling. As he walks through the streets he knows so well, he sees not only the destruction, but also how quiet they are now. “That emptiness actually makes me the saddest.” Now there is still so much to do that he cannot give those feelings much space. “But of course I will see a therapist when I get back to Casablanca.”
He points to a collapsed corner of a house. There is another bed on the first floor. A second bed lies on the ground floor, pieces of the frame and pieces of bedding sticking out from under the rubble. “Here we found my cousin. He was twenty years old,” says Marouane. A pickaxe has been dug into the rubble. “Once we dig out a deceased person, we leave the tools behind. No one ever wants to use them again.”
We stop again at one of the two mosques in the village. Another collapsed corner, another dangerously unstable pile of debris. “Look, that’s the imam’s chair, with its carpets. They’re very important to the people here, so we have to find a way to dig them out.” Marouane sighs. “It has to be done, but how? That was also the problem with the corpses: you could see them, but you couldn’t reach them.”
It added to the despair just after the quake, he explains, because the villagers knew that nightfall heralded the arrival of the hungry wild dogs.
Marouane (right) and his friend Salim in the village of Toulkine. Photo: Matthijs le Loux
‘Someone’s losing their mind!’
Then a relative of Marouane rushes towards him. Someone has lost their mind, he says. Marouane and Salim quickly follow him towards a collection of emergency tents on the other side of Toulkine. “Everything will be fine, except for me! Everyone will get a house again soon, except me!”
The screaming man stands on the edge of the roof. Everyone below is holding their breath. Then another man, who has been following him, puts an arm around him from behind and pulls him back onto the roof. He is forced down the stairs and out of the house. Marouane and Salim immediately walk to the government post in the village to discuss with the head of the region how the man can be taken to a military hospital an hour’s drive away. “There are only two options,” says Marouane. “He gets into the car of his own accord or we force him into it.”
While his friend consults with the official, Salim explains what happened to the man. “He was in Douzrou, a village a little further away, shortly after the disaster. Nearly a hundred people died there. What he saw there…”
(the text continues below the video)
3:24Play button
The village under the stones
Douzrou. Situated at the top of a steep slope, with breathtaking views over a deep valley and the rugged mountains on the other side. With approximately eight hundred inhabitants, it was one of the larger villages in the region. The name means ‘under the stones’ – a fact that has become startlingly macabre. Douzrou is now an isolated field full of rubble. Practically no building is still standing. The number of fatalities appears to be 89, more than one in ten.
One of the two roads to the village was washed away by the earthquake. The remaining road is a sandy path, where cars sometimes skim along the abyss at a distance of ten centimeters, followed by large clouds of dust.
A group of men in their early twenties climb with reporters over the piles of stones that were once their families’ homes. They all live and work somewhere else in Morocco, because there was no work to be found in Douzrou. When they rushed back to their home village after the quake, hell struck them.
“Four people died in that house on the left,” says Abdulrachim (22). “Two in that house, and eight further down the road, a whole family.” We walk past another boy, who stares into the distance with a blank look. “He lost his father.” Another ruin with flashes of normality – a clock on the wall, a children’s bicycle or an open bathroom cabinet with the care products still in it – and again a pile of stones with a pickaxe. Abdulrachim: “That’s where we found my uncle.”
Everyone in Douzrou has lost one or more family members. A piece of land that is hardly visible on the surface contains two mass graves: one for men and one for women. The sickly smell of death hangs everywhere, as the carcasses of the village’s animals still lie beneath the collapsed houses.
Only piles of rubble remain of the remote mountain village of Douzrou. Photo: Matthijs le Loux
‘Houses, houses, houses’
As if all that wasn’t enough, the survivors of Douzrou are now very concerned about what is to come. In summer this inhospitable area is already a harsh place, but in winter the temperature drops well below freezing and there is a meter of snow and ice. Then you don’t want to sit in an emergency tent made of thin cloth.
“We don’t want food, we don’t want clothes,” says Abdulrachim. “All we really need is for people to come here and build new houses for us. Houses, houses, houses!”
Earlier in the day, Marouane had the same message in Toulkine. “It’s as in Game of Thrones” he said with a wry smile. “Winter is coming.”
Get notifications of new posts Stay informed with notifications
2023-09-16 03:00:00
#Quake #survivors #shock #threat #lurks
