ARTICLE_2
.docxARTICLE. MAIN IDEAS. THE GUARDIAN
‘We need to start again’: Morocco’s earthquake puts girls’ education at risk
When 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.
“Many of the girls who we know are at least alive have lost mothers, brothers, fathers, family members and it looks like many of their houses have also been completely destroyed,” said Sonia Omar, the head of Education for All Morocco, her voice cracking.
The charity supports a network of six boarding houses for girls across the Atlas, all situated in villages around the epicentre of the quake.
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 – and 17 years of work to ensure girls in the Atlas can receive an education.
In the oldest house, which sits in the village of Asni, the quake had torn holes in the walls of the library, destroyed computer equipment and made the building uninhabitable. “This is where they spend their entire week,” said Latifa Aliza, a student coordinator for one of the boarding houses.
“We need to start from the beginning again with the building, because the building is very important,” she added, standing aghast in the ruins of a destroyed dormitory. The organisation says that five out of the six boarding houses will probably need to be torn down and completely rebuilt, with some currently unsafe to even enter.
“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.
Moroccan authorities estimate that almost 3,000 people were killed, and more than 5,500 wounded, in the earthquake. It was centred deep under the Atlas mountains about 43 miles south of Marrakech, but shook buildings and sent people running into the streets in fear as far away as the cities of Casablanca and Rabat in northern Morocco.
Much of Al Haouz has long been deprived of even basic infrastructure, and many of the remotest villages tucked high into the mountain peaks can be reached only on foot. Steep mountain roads that villagers traversed on donkeys or motorbikes are now blocked or dangerously cracked, amid fears of rockslides as aftershocks shake the peaks a week after the earthquake struck.
Helicopters continue to ferry the wounded out of the Atlas, with little hope of finding remaining survivors and fears that many villagers in the remotest villagers suffocated under the ruins of their mud-brick homes, which left no space to breathe as they collapsed.
Morocco’s King Mohammed VI has pledged to rebuild about 50,000 homes damaged by the earthquake.
Education for All was set up to ensure girls access to learning in some of the remotest parts of the Atlas. The challenges of reaching school buildings in the region are often tougher for girls.
Education rates for women in Morocco have slowly risen over the past two decades but as of 2018 64% of girls were in secondary school, according to the World Bank, and fewer than half of the women in Morocco recorded in the most recent figures from 2021 were receiving a tertiary education.
Omar believes ensuring that girls can get into the classroom from a young age is often enough to completely change their future. But with the boarding houses now in ruins, she and her organisation are scrambling to figure out what education facilities remain in the Atlas, and how to keep girls learning even if it means studying online from their tents.
“We’re trying to find out which schools have been damaged. Many teachers in the area lost family members and their homes. They’re sleeping outside in makeshift tents. As the villages are so remote, this is the very reason why we support these communities, because it means the aid that’s trickling in isn’t reaching there at all,” she said.
“Some areas have zero telephone contact, the roads are blocked and many villages aren’t even near a road. You have to park a car an hour away and walk; there’s no infrastructure.”
Amid the devastation, Omar found some small signs of hope. Many of their former graduates who went on to become, in her words, “pillars of their communities”, have now begun to coordinate aid efforts.
The group compiled a list of missing students and began their search, all while travelling throughout some of the remotest villages in the Atlas to distribute vital aid.
ADDITION: Emergency services were deployed to quake-stricken regions, as King Mohammed VI of Morocco ordered that a relief commission be set up to distribute aid to survivors. Offers of international aid poured in from countries including Japan, France and the UAE.
Hundreds of Moroccan Red Crescent volunteers are responding after the recent 6.8 magnitude earthquake that hit Morocco, killing more than 2,800 people and injuring thousands more.
To support the Moroccan Red Crescent scale up their relief efforts, the IFRC has issued an appeal for 100 million Swiss francs. The American Red Cross is coordinating with its global Red Cross and Red Crescent partners on ways it can assist in the response.
VOCABULARY POINTS.
TO JOLT - [I or T, usually + adv/prep] to (cause something or someone to) move suddenly and violently - встряхнуть, привести в действие, подтолкнуть, дать толчок к...
TO FERRY - verb [T usually + adv/prep] to transport people or goods in a vehicle, especially regularly and often - перевозить, переправлять, перегонять.
TO SUFFOCATE - verb [I or T] to (cause someone to) die because of not having enough oxygen - задыхаться, задохнуться, душить, удушать.
TO COMPILE - verb [T] to collect information from different places and arrange it in a book, report, or list - компилировать - составлять, соединять результаты чужих исследований, мыслей без самостоятельной обработки источников.
TO PLEDGE - verb [T] to make a serious or formal promise to give or do something - обязаться, клясться, обещать