(Imi N’Tala) “My dad would call me and I would shout “I’m here, I’m here””. Little Ibtissam was miraculously saved from the rubble of her house, but she is traumatized by the earthquake which razed her entire village in Morocco.
Five days after the most powerful earthquake to ever hit Morocco, his family settled in a small tent, alongside around ten families, below their village of Imi N’Tala, 75 km away. south of Marrakech.
For Ibtissam Aït Iddar, 9 years old, the shock of the shock was compounded by the pain of having lost two friends.
“With Mouna and Zineb, we went to school together even if we were not in the same class,” she says modestly.
“I’m afraid for her,” whispers her mother Naïma Benhamou who lost her youngest daughter, aged 4, her mother and her mother-in-law in the earthquake.
Ibtissam was pulled out of the rubble at the last minute by her father and uncle after the collapse of their house, swallowed up by voluminous mounting stones.
But for now what worries Naïma is the psychological state of her daughter who often wakes up at night in tears, shouting “get me out, I’ve fallen”.
” Nightmare ”
Imi N’Tala is nestled at an altitude of more than 1400 meters in the Toubkal massif. The village buildings are built along the length of a narrow and winding road surveying the High Atlas mountain range.
According to the survivors of this village of 400 souls, more than 84 people, including 20 children, died during the powerful earthquake which transformed the village into a field of ruins permeated by the pestilential odor of death.
Rescuers managed to extract one body on Wednesday and continued to search for five others.
Not far from them, Youssef Aït Raiss, 11, remembers in the family tent how “the house fell”.
“We were stuck under the debris,” says the boy whose parents were elsewhere during the earthquake.
His brother Zakaria, 13, who joins him adds: “we were with our grandmother, it was like a nightmare”.
The two boys lost their grandmother and their 16-year-old brother is still in the emergency room at Marrakech University Hospital.
Worrying situation
Youssef also lost two classmates, Taoufik and Khalid. “We were at school together, we played together,” he says shyly.
Their school, near the village, was seriously damaged by the earthquake, classes were suspended there, as in around forty communes in the provinces of Al Haouz, Chichaoua and Taroudant.
UNESCO on Wednesday judged the situation in the field of education “worrying”, with 530 schools and 55 boarding schools degraded.
“The earthquake impacted a particularly rural and isolated area […] with approximately one million enrolled students and a teaching staff of more than 42,000 professionals,” said a statement from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Ibtissam Aït Iddar was also “shocked” to see her school damaged. “She told me if we can’t even go to school, we have to leave here as quickly as possible,” says her mother.
Her uncle Mohamed Aït Toulkine then comes out of the tent and says: “I will do everything to send her to Marrakech, it is important that she continues her studies”.
Khadija Ouhssine, 32, lost two of her daughters aged 2 and 11 as well as her in-laws.
“Losing your children is a feeling that no words can describe,” she said in front of her house, which was completely destroyed.
A rescue team was working there Wednesday to extract the body of his father-in-law, still trapped under the rubble.