hen a powerful earthquake struck deep below Morocco’s Atlas mountains last Friday night, the school year had only just begun. Staff from a girls’ education charity who had stayed late at work suddenly found themselves jolted by the force of a 6.8 magnitude quake as the walls of their offices crumbled around them to expose the cold mountain air.
In an instant the force of the quake wrenched apart the walls of the boarding houses, needed in a mountainous region beset by poor infrastructure where schools may otherwise simply be too difficult to access – andAt one boarding house for 52 students in the remote village of Talat N’Yaaqoub, a supervisor filmed the ruins of her bedroom.
“The situation is difficult right now; there’s so much damage,” Aliza said. “We still haven’t located all of our students, especially those in the area around Talat N’Yaaqoub, which is still difficult to access. Our organisation is doing everything it can to reach them.” Omar said the organisation is still searching for roughly a third of their student body, which numbers about 250 girls.
A strip of villages dotted across the Atlas mountains in the Al Haouz region around the epicentre were by far the worst hit, because of their location and the intense difficulties in conducting rescues.