Nearly 3,000 people died in Friday’s magnitude 6.8 earthquake. Rural, mountainous areas lack resources, but there are ways each of us can come Moroccans’ aid.
“Earthquake!” my sister wrote me in a text late on Friday. She had been visiting family in our hometown of Rabat, Morocco’s capital, and had just settled down for the night when the temblor started. Like me, my sister lives in California, a place that has long taught us to live with disaster. The shaking had lasted only a couple of seconds. “Woke up everyone,” she said, though she didn’t seem worried. “Now back to sleep.”
I went online, scouring social media sites for news. The videos that emerged over the next hour were all from Marrakech, where the quake had shaken the iconic minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque, reduced some of the ocher walls of the medina to rubble and sent late-night patrons at a trendy café scrambling into the street. But the epicenter of the magnitude 6.8 earthquake turned out to be about 50 miles away in Oukaimedene, a ski resort in the High Atlas Mountains.
The High Atlas is an area of unparalleled beauty, with high peaks and narrow passes that attract hikers and backcountry campers, as well as sites of significant cultural heritage, such as the 12th century Tinmel Mosque. The High Atlas is also home to hundreds of small villages, where people are known for their hospitality. What little they have, they will insist on sharing with visitors. Decades later, I still remember how my friends and I once stopped to ask for directions in a hamlet in the mountains and were invited in for tea and fritters.
