“My tears do not dry.” After the violent earthquake that destroyed his village of Talat N’Yaqoub south of Marrakech, Abdellah narrowly escaped death, but lost two of his children under the rubble.
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On the day of the tragedy, 39-year-old Abdellah Aït Bihi thought he could “sleep peacefully when the roof collapsed on us.”
“My oldest (14) came out first, we still don’t know how. Thanks to the help of the neighbors we managed to find the way. I was able to get my 10-year-old daughter and my wife out,” says this 39-year-old left leg amputee who lost his prosthesis during the earthquake.
But it was too late to save his boys, ages 4 and 12.
“When I came back, I saw the elder inanimate, he had received stones in his upper body, I quickly understood that. The smallest one was still alive, he spoke, but I had no way to reach him, he was only taken out yesterday,” says Abdellah, who also lost his parents in the earthquake, breaking into tears.
“My tears don’t stop, I want them to stop, but the pain is stronger than anything else,” he says under the pained gaze of his silent but also crying wife.
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“Life will never be the same”
At the entrance to the village of Talat N’Yaqoub, the Aït Bihi family sought refuge after the earthquake.
Under olive trees, she shares a simple carpet as a living space with another family, that of Latifa Aït Bizli.
This 30-year-old woman managed to save her three children, ages 3, 7 and 10, as well as her elderly in-laws when the roof of her house collapsed.
“The luck we had was that we were at the top, I grabbed my children first and managed to get them out of an excavation,” recalls Latifa Aït Bizli.
“I came back while the earth was still shaking to pick up my in-laws,” she says.
When she was outside, she was “astonished” to see the extent of the damage; all the houses had been blown away, including her sister’s.
She died with her husband and two children. “I couldn’t do anything for them, I have remorse, I still can’t cope with the idea that they’re no longer here,” complains this thirty-year-old, whose husband is still alive. was in another village on the evening of the earthquake.
“Life will no longer be the same for us,” decides Latifa, lamenting her precarious living conditions. “But thanks to the benefactors we manage to survive,” he says.
After the earthquake there was a wave of solidarity, with many Moroccans traveling to remote villages to bring food, medicine, blankets and mattresses for the victims using their own resources.
“Shocked”
Rachida Aït Malek, another Talat N’Yaqoub resident, thought she was going to die before neighbors intervened.
“I was upstairs with my two children, my mother and two of my sisters, one of whom was pregnant, while my nephew was downstairs. “Three of our neighbors mobilized to pull us out from under the rubble,” explains this woman in her 20s, lying under a tree surrounded by her two small children.
She was the last to be rescued from the rubble, more than six hours after the first quake. And when her two sisters were hospitalized, Rachida, her children and her mother were unharmed.
But psychologically she had difficulty getting over it. “I am still in shock, I cannot describe the pain that has haunted me since this tragedy. “We have risen from the dead,” muses the young woman.
His nephew’s body has still not been found, despite significant resources being expended to recover bodies buried under the rubble in this deprived town near the epicenter of the earthquake.