Omar Ait Mbarek was on the phone with his fiancée when the earth began to shake in the Moroccan city of Tikht. He heard objects fall to the ground and suddenly the line was cut. At that moment I knew I had lost her forever.
“What do you want me to say? I’m devastated,” says the 25-year-old, red-eyed and full of tears, after burying Mina Ait Bihi in Tikht, whom he was due to marry in a few weeks. .
The village a few kilometers from the epicenter of the earthquake, in the Atlas Mountains, was completely destroyed. This was the deadliest earthquake in Morocco in more than sixty years.
Rescuers struggled to pull the young woman’s body from the rubble of the house, which turned to dust after the shock.
Next to her they found her phone, which she used to speak to her fiancé seconds before she died. His body now rests in a makeshift cemetery, where 68 other earthquake victims were buried.
The town, which was home to about a hundred families, is now a pile of wood and masonry scraps, broken crockery, mismatched shoes and intricately patterned carpets.
“Life is over here,” laments Mohssin Aksum, a 33-year-old man with part of his family in this village. “The city is dead,” he insisted.
Like most of the hardest-hit municipalities, Tikht was a village where many houses were built in traditional ways using a mixture of stone, wood and mortar.
Dozens of residents, grieving relatives and soldiers gathered at the ruins this Sunday. Several people said they could not remember another earthquake like this in this region.
“It’s not something people here think about when they build their houses,” said Abdelrahman Edjal, a 23-year-old student who lost most of his family in the disaster.
But the quality of the building materials is not the main concern of this young man, sitting on a rock in the middle of the rubble, under a bright blue sky in the middle of the mountains.
After dinner he went for a walk. And the earthquake began. He saw people fleeing from collapsing houses. He pulled his father from the ruins of the family home, but his injuries were so severe that Abdelrahman Edjal’s father died at his side.
“Less Than Nothing”
Aksum was originally from that location and now lives in Rabat. He regrets that the earthquake took away what little these people had. He points to his nose and explains that the smell comes from cattle, the only source of wealth for many residents, now also buried under rubble and decomposing. “Now people have less than nothing,” he says.
As he speaks, two young men wearing clothes stained with dust from the rubble, sitting on the rocks, cry without saying a word.
On the way to the city you see yellow tents set up as emergency shelter. Members of the Civil Protection transport stretchers from a military truck to the tents. NGOs are also active in the region, assessing the shelter, food and water needs of residents staying in places like Tikht.
Still shocked by the losses and the extent of the destruction, many say they don’t know what to do. But Omar Ait Mbarek is clear about the next step. “I’m going to rebuild my house,” he assures, holding his late fiancée’s dust-covered phone.
Source: DN
