When the earth seized his house and shook it late Friday night, Mohamed Abarada ran outside with his 9-month-old daughter in his arms. His mother, his wife and his 9-year-old daughter were still inside, trapped.
Mr. Abarada started digging with his bare hands. He dug by day with the help of neighbors and relatives, and by night with the flashlight on his phone.
The two older women were pulled out lifeless, joining the roster of the dead in Douar Tnirt, a village of a few hundred people a long way down a narrow winding road high in the Atlas Mountains.
But on Monday, his daughter Chaima had yet to be found.
With Mr. Abarada’s shoulder injured, his fellow searchers urged him to rest while they kept sifting through what had been his house — broken bricks mingled with broken wood, bamboo roofing, couch cushions, a satellite dish and teakettles, all the flotsam of family life. He ignored them. He had an exact idea of where Chaima had been — on the stairs, trying to flee — and he and the others worked at the hole they had made with shovels, picks and their bare, untrained hands.
All Monday they worked as the sun poured down, Mr. Abarada, his brothers and other neighbors. There were no emergency responders in sight, no officials, no one but them — and then no one but him. When the other villagers left for a lunch break, he stayed, tossing debris from the hole log by log, emptying it of broken stones basketful by basketful.
Roosters crowed, though there were only him and a few others to hear. A tiny kitten darted around his feet, mewing, and he clucked to it. Onlookers from outside the village passed by, snapping photos and shaking their heads, murmuring at the father’s perseverance. He kept working, his green T-shirt increasingly brown with dust.
“Poor guy,” said Fatema Benija, 32, whose house had faced Mr. Abarada’s, and who was now spending her days in a van parked between the two piles of rubble. “For two days, nobody came to check on us. You have no idea what we went through. Hunger, cold.”
And then a lament: “If only they had rescued people earlier.”
It is nothing new for Douar Tnirt, villagers said. Medical care has long been far away, and even schooling is limited to one hour a day at the two-room primary school, the road there narrow and rocky.
The government, people said, seems barely to know they exist.
Then, about 4:45 p.m. on Monday, help, finally, appeared to be on the way. People in boots and helmets tramped up the path to the collapsed house. There were Moroccan government personnel and a Spanish search-and-rescue team, accompanied by a journalist for 2M, Morocco’s state-owned broadcast channel.
Suddenly, Mr. Abarada’s lonely patch of mud bricks looked like the earthquake-rescue scene viewers all over the world are used to seeing. There was a human chain of volunteers in fluorescent vests blocking onlookers from the debris-strewn mountain, a trained dog to sniff out bodies, people in neat uniforms, looking grave…
2023-09-11 20:17:01
Source from www.nytimes.com
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