‘How can we rebuild?’
‘How can we rebuild?’
Survivors of last year’s deadly earthquake in Morocco are still waiting for the government to deliver on its big reconstruction pledge.
Malika Akestour in Al Haouz
Last September, Morocco was rocked by an earthquake so strong, it was felt as far away as Spain. The 6.8-magnitude quake, the strongest ever recorded in the country, killed more than 2,900 and injured over 5,500 people, and damaged at least 59,438 buildings. The people who survived are still freezing or burning in tented shelters, a year on.
The epicentre was Al Haouz, a province of farming villages that run along the rugged terrain of the High Atlas Mountains. In the traditional Amazigh village of Tansghart, cracks tore through the walls of the hillside homes built of mud-brick, stones and rough wooden beams, and the minarets of two mosques in the village collapsed.
That day was a “catastrophe in every sense of the word,” said Tansghart resident Montasser Itri. It’s etched into his memory as the “stench of death, the loss of family and neighbours, and shock”. In mere seconds, the village’s unique Amazigh architecture was disfigured forever.
In public speeches after the disaster, Morocco’s Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch emphasised reconstruction as a government priority, and King Mohammed VI pledged to compensate families and rebuild destroyed homes, schools, health facilities and roads.
So far, 57,000 beneficiaries have each been given 20,000 dirhams ($2,000) to rebuild their homes, according to Akhannouch’s office, meaning that even by the government’s own count, the owners of nearly 2,500 damaged buildings have not yet received this support.
On the ground, many of the worst-hit parts of the country are still in tatters. Thousands of people without homes live in crude plastic tents along the hillsides, in which they battled the winter chill and then the harsh summer heat.
“The pace of rebuilding the collapsed houses is agonisingly slow,” says Mohamed Ait M’barek, a 34-year-old resident of Tlat Niaqoub, a town near the epicentre.
The earthquake destroyed Tlat Niaqoub’s only health facility. Nowadays the village relies on a single ambulance to transport patients to a hospital in Marrakesh, 100km away. The vehicle does not even have an oxygen tank. The quake also damaged the middle and high schools in the area, pushing children to take up schooling in nearby cities.
In the village of Ijoukak, a site so perilously close to the epicentre that every home was destroyed, Fatima Zoubair, a 27-year-old CorpsAfrica volunteer, has been helping families that survived the quake. She said that, between Ijaoukak and the nearby village of Iguidi, 150 families are still in tents and “most of them are not suitable for living”.
The family of 18-year-old Aicha Id Massoud is one of them. Each morning her family cooks all of their meals in one go, before the rising sun makes the kitchen too hot to enter. “The heat is so extreme that it’s almost unbearable,” she said.
But the shelter Massoud shares with her parents and four siblings is still an improvement on what the government provided. They had to buy reeds and wood to build their own makeshift shelters and cover them in plastic because the tents provided were “foul-smelling and caused illnesses among the children”, she said. “Even with the plastic, rain still leaks in, and we have to disconnect the electricity to prevent electrical issues and short circuits, especially during the winter.”
From Massoud’s family shelters, the nearest water source is a 200m walk away and its water is dirty. “If you pour the water into a glass, you’ll see mud settling at the bottom,” said Massoud. “But we have no other option but to drink it.”
Local officials say reconstruction efforts have been slowed by all sorts of snags. Amine Ait Manssour, who leads a local humanitarian group, said the initial demolition process was held up for lack of financing. Costs then skyrocketed due to the mountainous terrain and inflation in the price of building materials. And local factories simply don’t have the capacity to produce enough materials, leading to further delays.
But the survivors are losing patience.
“The indifference, negligence, and failure to implement the royal statement from September of last year leads us to feel pessimistic, to be honest,” said Itri.