CNN
Rajaa Acherhri was known as the village math genius. At six years old, she loved solving problems way above her grade level. He sister Sanaa had big dreams too. She wanted to become a doctor, her mother Fatema told CNN.
After dinner on Friday night, the girls were lounging with their heads together in their family home. Rajaa asleep after a long day at school. Sanaa, 12, playing with her phone.
Suddenly, the ground started shaking violently. Fatema was still tidying up in the kitchen when her house begun collapsing around her. She said she leapt towards her girls, only to see them crushed by part of the ceiling. Both were gone instantly.
She buried them the next day, alongside 19 other people who were killed in Tinzert, a tiny mountain village in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
These are among the more than 2,900 people who perished in the disaster, according to state-run broadcaster 2M in the latest death toll, quoting the Moroccan interior ministry.
The quake is also believed to have affected about 100,000 children, according to initial reports, UNICEF said on Monday.
The earthquake has reduced Tinzert to one giant pile of rubble. The damage is so bad it is impossible to tell where one home starts and another finishes. The houses here were old, built in the traditional way – of mud and straw. They were not made to withstand an earthquake; they didn’t need to be. This area doesn’t have earthquakes; there hasn’t been one this bad in more than 120 years.
“It took 10 seconds for the whole village to disappear,” Hakim Idlhousein told CNN.
His house was sliced in half by the earthquake, left looking like a partially collapsed doll’s house. The front is completely gone, while parts of the back are left exposed, including a kitchen cabinet full of supplies that is somehow still standing while everything around it is in ruins.
On Monday afternoon, Idlhousein was having a simple meal with his parents and cousins. Some bread, oil, strong coffee with lots of sugar, laid out a tray outside, on a flat piece of ground where they have been spending their days and nights since the quake. Their house is destroyed and they are afraid of more aftershocks.
A group of neighbors came by, they all hugged and kissed, shared words of comfort and the coffee. With just 300 people, Tinzert is so small that everyone here knows everyone by name. Everyone here lost someone they loved.
The road leading to Tinzert is narrow and steep, and much of the village is now impossible to reach by car.
