The doorbell rang again and again, but the house was gone. Like almost every building in Douar Tnirt, a village high in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, the house is a ruin of broken mud bricks, its broken doorbell insisting in vain that, even after strong earthquake, it is still a place where people. survive.
At first, the villagers hoped to find survivors under the rubble of their houses. Immediately after Friday’s earthquake, they began searching and rescuing with their bare, untrained hands, eventually adding shovels and picks.
By Sunday, the government had not sent emergency responders or aid to Douar Tnirt and several other mountain villages visited by journalists for The New York Times. The villagers are alone, trapped at the end of winding, narrow mountain passes, at the mercy of the monumental landscape they inhabit.
“That night, everyone was screaming,” said Zahra Id al-Houcine, who watched as some of her male neighbors sifted through the debris of her collapsed home in search of her relatives on Sunday in afternoon. “We heard screams until we couldn’t hear anymore,”
The list of loved ones that Ms. Id al-Houcine that he lost in the earthquake was unbearable: the son of her deceased husband, his son’s wife and three of their children, including a child, who all lived with him. Then he knew someone who had died, even though he had not seen their bodies: A 5-year-old and the two children of her husband’s brother.
When the house started shaking, Ms. Id al-Houcine had just gone to bed and was about to put on the evening radio program she started listening to earlier this year to keep herself company after her husband died, one that Moroccans are talking about. their problems and their life stories. Then the ceiling dropped on him “like an elevator,” he said.
What also prevented him from dying, was his mattress, where the force of the collapsing house folded him down as he descended. He screamed for help, his mouth filled with dust, until people pulled him away.
Now he alternately sits on a pile of stones and a pillow that someone found, surrounded by the ruins of his house: pieces of cement, bamboo branches used for the roof scattered even where, a twisted refrigerator, a satellite dish fell on top of everything. . Somewhere down there were other children. He did not hear them shout.
A few amateur rescuers from the neighborhood stood over the pile, throwing clothes or other salvageable items as they found them. Are there masks, they asked? The smell of corpses reached them.
Throughout Douar Tnirt, rescuers said, the bodies of the dead emerged in such dire condition that relatives rushed to bury them without washing them – skipping an important part of the Muslim burial ritual – or there is a prayer. In some cases, they didn’t even dig holes, they just threw dirt at the dead in an effort to restore their dignity as soon as possible.
“They don’t want to see them, and, well, it’s about respecting the dead,” said Ms. Id al-Houcine.
Some survived, including some who were pulled out on Saturday, but waited so long for transport to hospitals in Marrakesh that they died before they could be loaded into their car or their motorcycle, residents said. Ambulances were nowhere to be seen.
“If you can, you can do it,” said Abdessamad Ait Ihia, 17, one of the volunteer diggers. “If you don’t, you won’t.”
