I am a PhD student in Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University and live in the Al Haouz region of Morocco. I have been deeply connected to communities in the High Atlas since I was an English teacher in a girls’ dormitory in Asni from 2019 to 2020. Since then, my life has remained closely intertwined, both personally and professionally, with the rural communities of Al Haouz, living on and off in the villages as I follow the lives of 51 girls from the dormitory where I taught over 5 years for my PhD research.
In September 2023, I was in the final months of completing my ethnographic fieldwork. During that hot summer, I had been walking from village to village in Talat n’Yakoub, completing the few life history interviews remaining with girls in my research cohort. On 8th September, I had interviews planned in a village; however, I had to leave Morocco at short notice when a family member became unwell. At 10 am, I took a last-minute flight out of Marrakech to London. That evening just before midnight, an earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale hit Morocco, with its epicentre in the Talat n’Yakoub region. The village where I was planning to be was destroyed. Immediately after the earthquake hit, I started to receive messages to check that I was alive. Due to my last-minute travel, nobody knew that I had left the region.
Many of my former students, girls who form my research cohort, are now studying at university in Marrakech and had returned to the city just days before the earthquake, narrowly avoiding being caught up in the epicentre. This was not the case for their families. In the moments following the earthquake, girls wanted to contact their families in the mountains. Students from rural villages live off less than $40 a month and buy a specific phone credit which costs $3 a month, granting unlimited access to social media and WhatsApp, but not the ability to make phone calls. Without financial means to buy call credit, my students got in touch via WhatsApp and asked me to call their families to check they were alive. On that first night, I made dozens of calls to the villages. Nobody knew at this time that the epicentre of the quake was outside of Marrakech, or the true extent of what had happened in Al Haouz. The earthquake hit in the middle of the night, in the pitch darkness and cut the electricity, so that first night we didn't receive any images of what had happened. The first call I made was to my friend's brother Abdelhakim, whose family I have lived with for extended periods of time during my fieldwork. Our conversation remains in my memory:
Hello?
It’s Ella, did you feel the earthquake?
Yes.
Are you okay?
Alhamdulillah.
The immediate media coverage of the earthquake focussed on Marrakech. Pictures of cracked buildings in the old medina and a viral video of the Koutoubia swaying made global headlines the following morning. The extent of what had happened in Al Haouz still wasn't clear to those without contacts in the region. There is only one major road leading up to the villages of Al Haouz, and this was blocked by boulders and rubble preventing access to the villages. The first time I went up after the earthquake, there were still vehicles along the side of the road which had been flattened by falling rocks, the passengers inside crushed on impact. We received grainy videos from friends filmed on old Nokia phones showing villages reduced to rubble. However, the electricity was still down, and soon we lost contact as people lost the ability to charge their phones.
Since 2020, I had been working alongside my PhD for a British-Moroccan association focussing on strengthening cultural ties between the two Kingdoms by carrying out educational, cultural and charitable activities in Morocco, particularly in the High Atlas region. On the night of the earthquake, we launched a public fundraiser to raise funds for the region. The fundraiser was launched under my name, and the following morning my phone started to ring with requests for media interviews. I had never spoken to the media before. Whilst giving the first radio interview at 8 am the following morning, a WhatsApp message appeared on my screen letting me know of the first of my research participants who had passed away, along with her entire family. I had been in her home around a week before.
I flew back out to Morocco 48 hours after the earthquake. I wasn't sure exactly what I would do on my return to Morocco besides assisting where I could for the communities where I had been living for my PhD research. However, I did not anticipate what unfolded. In the first week, I served as a media contact for English-speaking news outlets, being one of the few, if not only, native-English speakers who knew the region around the epicentre and could provide updates on the situation on the ground whilst road access was still blocked and the power still down. I had never given a media interview before the earthquake happened but found myself giving live radio and TV interviews from transit vans and village roadsides.
The Moroccan government took the decision not to allow international aid into the country. The motivation behind this remains unclear to those of us who were working on the ground in Al Haouz, however, the consequence was that the organisations expected to arrive to a country following a disaster were not permitted to enter. International search and rescue teams were also not granted permission to enter Morocco in the immediate aftermath. Some of my research participants survived the earthquake but later passed away under the rubble. By the time the UK Search and Rescue Team was granted access and arrived in the earthquake zone on 11th September, they only recovered bodies. By the time the military arrived, the villages had already buried their dead. We will never know exactly how many people lost their lives in the Al Haouz earthquake.
Without international aid, much of the relief effort fell to associations and charities already operating on the ground in Morocco before the earthquake. This is how I found myself coordinating one of the major British-led relief efforts. I suspended my PhD studies and set up a relief effort, first from the bedroom of a riad in the old medina, but later this evolved into a warehouse operation, network of transit vans and a team of over 20 Moroccan volunteers. At this time, we hoped the situation would be temporary, until international agencies were granted access, however this never happened. None of the associations working on the ground had experience in disaster zones or humanitarian relief. We lacked information about the affected area, a remote region of over 5000 villages, many inaccessible by road. Before the earthquake, we worked in disparate sectors, from biodiversity to women's literacy, and didn't have established lines of communication, so we had no way of coordinating our relief efforts. In the first few weeks at times, we arrived at a village only to find another association had visited just a few hours before, whilst other villages had yet to receive aid. Ethnographic research did not prepare me for sourcing transit vans, loading lorries, or procuring wholesale vegetables at dawn. However, using the local contacts and Tachelhit language I have acquired through my fieldwork, I was able to carry out these tasks when doing so became essential.
At first, everyone leading the relief efforts was on the road from dawn until the early hours of the morning. We reacted as best we could, without preparation, and didn't have time or capacity to attempt to coordinate our efforts. Many associations were operating without offices or full-time staff. In the first few weeks, I was trapped in the mountains some nights when boulders fell and blocked the road access. One of the nights I spent in a village, there was a serious aftershock, one of many that continued to hit the region and claim more lives. Eventually, we managed to organise the relief effort between the associations on the ground, working collaboratively to create a database of village needs from local contacts, and a system recording aid distributions throughout the affected area. During the first 3 months, we recorded 1665 aid drops in 839 affected villages, tracking the work of 18 different organisations. This does not include the efforts of solidarity by Moroccan citizens who drove across the country to deliver what they could to families in the villages.
In December, I stepped away from coordinating the relief efforts to begin to return to my PhD research. This distance has given me time to reflect on our position as ethnographers working in the field, and the relationships we have with our research participants, particularly when a major event or disaster occurs. As ethnographers, we spend long periods of time in our field sites, isolated from regular social networks, and this often leads to forming deep relationships with our participants. Over the 5 years I have been living and working in Al Haouz, I have developed meaningful relationships with communities, particularly in Abdelhakim's village where I have become an adopted member of the community, with the same rights and obligations placed upon me as other community members. I am expected, for example, to pay Zakat-al-Fitr in Abdelhakim's village, to take part in household labour, and I am known in the region of Talat n’Yakoub as illis n Omar (Omar's daughter, the father of Abdelhakim). This means that I have the same rights to care and protection from male family members as other females in the household, but also implicates me in the shame/honour code that governs female conduct, with my behaviour having direct implications on the family's reputation. I am treated, but also expected to respect the same codes of behaviour, as other girls within the community. This was a noticeable shift that happened around three years into my fieldwork, and has simultaneously deepened my relationship with my fieldsite community and placed restrictions on my freedoms. In 2019, for example, I was able to visit the souk alone, something I can no longer do without being accompanied by a male family member. The loss of my field site and several of my research participants was therefore extremely difficult on a personal level, as well as a professional one as ethnographer. The places where we live and work and the people there become our communities over the course of our fieldwork. Whilst delivering aid, I would pass every day the destroyed house of a friend who lost her life. Aid distributions to villages were often the moment when I found out who had survived the earthquake and who had not.
As ethnographers, we hold liminal positions within our field site communities. Although I have been metaphorically adopted as a member of my fieldsite community, I remain both inside and outside. Community members know me as the girl who collects stories, who sits with women in the kitchen talking whilst baking bread, and who travels long distances to hear girls talk about their lives. When the earthquake hit, people wanted to tell their story. They asked me to write and record what had happened to them. The first weeks saw intense action in the region, Moroccan families drove to Al Haouz to bring supplies, the roads were busier than ever, and government officials came to observe the damage. However, after this, people felt abandoned and forgotten and wanted their story to be told. I have spent years asking people to share their stories with me for my PhD, and I therefore felt an obligation to my participants to record their stories of what happened to them on 8th September. These were stories of solidarity and resilience, but also of trauma and loss. Listening and recording these stories leads us to sharing in this collective trauma that will remain with communities for generations to come.
What happened in Al Haouz has led me to question where our duty as ethnographers lies. Over the course of fieldwork, we acquire deep knowledge about our field site and the people who live there. Before the earthquake, Talat n’Yakoub was a remote and obscure region of Morocco that even many Marrakech residents had never heard about. After 8th September, Talat n’Yakoub suddenly became the focus of international attention, and the knowledge that I had acquired about the region became an invaluable source for relief efforts, media, and the international community. I believe that as ethnographers, we have a duty to the communities that invest their time and trust in us during our research to serve them when we can. However, I found my position as both insider and outsider led to this being a strange and uncomfortable experience when the international spotlight was shone on my field site. Overnight, dozens of international news reporters and volunteers descended on the villages of Talat n’Yakoub, places that had remained off the map until September 2023. Often, villages and their communities were treated without regard. People came to take pictures of the disaster zone in a form of ‘disaster tourism,’ filming inhabitants in moments of extreme trauma and vulnerability, foreign journalists entered villages and collapses homes without seeking the consent of the inhabitants, and at one time I saw myself appearing in a photo on social media of ‘earthquake victims’ as I was sitting with my adopted fieldwork family discussing where in the village to install the solar lights we had received. As ethnographers, we aim to build and develop relationships based on respect, mutuality and trust with our research participants. Seeing these principles reversed, often by people from my native UK, was an experience that brought up emotions of anger, shame and betrayal.
The earthquake has also left me with questions around how what happened will impact the region long-term, firstly in terms of gender relations. I anticipate that the earthquake will have a detrimental impact on the advancement of girls’ education in the region. Schools around the epicentre have been destroyed. The region's two high schools in Asni and Talat n’Yakoub are closed. In the villages, primary schools have reopened in tents. However, students from middle and high schools have been moved to other regions such as Chichaoua and placed in dormitory accommodation. The evacuation of students from Al Haouz was chaotic. Parents received word that the government were coming to take the children but didn't know where they would be taken, or for how long. Rural students typically don't have a phone and it took days before they could communicate their location to their parents. Although high school students from the region were used to living away from home to study – the majority live in government dormitories next to the high schools in Asni and Talat n’Yakoub – middle school students were used to studying close to their villages, and had often never left the region before. Understandably, parents did not always want to send their daughters far away to an unknown location, and many girls remained at home. Whether they will return to school in the coming academic year remains unclear.
For girls studying at university, the earthquake also impacted their studies. Students from rural areas receive a government grant to study at university, but the amount is not enough to cover the costs of rent and food, and parents and family have to offer financial support to their sons and daughters studying in the city. When the earthquake hit, families lost their homes, their livestock, their shops, their livelihoods and were unable to continue to financially support their children to return to university. Although this impacted both boys and girls, gender norms dictated that girls more often than boys opted to stay home and help their families in the aftermath of the earthquake.
On the flipside, I also witnessed a reversal of traditional gender norms in the weeks and months following the earthquake. Throughout the region around the epicentre, there is a network of girls’ dormitories run by a British NGO. As a result, there is now a generation of educated girls in the region who have had exposure to an international NGO and most villages in the region have one or two girls who have been through one of these dormitories. These girls are social media educated and have developed connections outside of the region. In villages where we distributed aid, I saw these girls stepping up to take on organisational roles within their local village association, communicating with authorities on behalf of the village thanks to their knowledge of Arabic, or using their foreign language skills and contacts they had developed outside of the region to secure aid for their village from NGOs based outside the region or internationally. In one case, a girl from a village in Talat n’Yakoub succeeded in using Instagram to secure an influencer visiting her village and building a temporary mosque.
Whilst girls were stepping up to take on roles not previously claimed by women, the earthquake also disrupted men's traditional role as providers. In the first few weeks following the earthquake, I often found men silent and withdrawn sitting alone on the outskirts of the village. This feeling of helplessness was exacerbated by associations who came to villages and brought volunteers to carry out labour, preventing local males from participating in the efforts. Men would much rather have been provided with the tools and equipment to do the tasks themselves, allowing them to fulfil their expected roles as providers for their families and communities.
The earthquake has also led to disruptions to traditional gendered spaces and household structure. Tents were distributed in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake; however, their number was often insufficient to serve all of the households in the village. This led to different organisational systems. In Abdelhakim's village, two large tents were joined together to house the women and children, and other two for the men, with 20 inhabitants in each structure. In other villages, two or three households shared one tent. This disrupted traditional household structure but also led to the erosion of traditional gendered division of spaces due to lack of privacy – with villages resorting to operating communal spaces, kitchens, and bathrooms. In addition, tents become insufferably hot in the day, resulting in people spending the majority of the day outdoors, which has increased the visibility of women in public spaces traditionally restricted to men. It remains to be seen if the changes to gender relations and gendered spaces in villages following the earthquake will have a lasting impact on communities.
I also fear that what happened in September 2023 will have a lasting impact on the cultural landscape of Al Haouz. The influx of NGOs, volunteers, disaster tourists and media from outside the region has had a noticeable effect on inhabitants, particularly children. It is now common for children in villages to run towards unknown vehicles, looking in the windows in anticipation of what is inside, or to ask for sweets, money, or clothes on the street. This was unheard of before September 2023. In some cases, NGOs’ lack of local knowledge or unwillingness to engage with local communities in the aid distribution process has created tensions or exacerbated existing tensions between local communities. In particular, the distribution of semi-permanent shelter, such as plastic container homes, has resulted in local conflicts. NGOs from outside the region, or projects funded by international charities often indiscriminately delivered shelter to villages without knowledge of the number of households living there. This forced local leaders to make difficult decisions about which households would receive shelter and which would continue to live under tents and tarpaulins. Lack of local knowledge also led to uneven distribution of aid, with villages with road access receiving more aid than those located off road, creating new conflicts.
Despite the tensions created by lack of local knowledge and engagement with local communities, overall, the inhabitants of Al Haouz have responded with solidarity and cooperation. One village in Talat n’Yakoub has an informal alliance with five surrounding villages who do not have road access. Due to its location on the road, this village received the majority of aid, however, locals stored all aid received in the only building still standing, and distributed everything proportionately between the six villages, with representatives of each village arriving by mule, motorbike or with wheelbarrows to transport the aid back to their respective villages. There was one instance where, on the morning of a distribution of vegetables to a village, I received a call from the local leader to let me know that they had heard the village across the river from them was in a much worse condition, and I should take the vegetables there instead.
A more interesting impact of the earthquake on the cultural landscape that I have witnessed has been the revival of the traditional Amazigh tiwizi system of communal labour. Tiwizi is voluntary work provided by a group of villagers to help a member of the village accomplish a task he or she cannot do alone. Tiwizi is more commonly extended to individuals but is also sometimes organised for community projects such as building mosques or maintaining roads and irrigation systems. Although I was aware of the existence of tiwizi, I had not previously witnessed such communal labour occurring in my field site until the earthquake of September 2023. Following the earthquake, I saw tiwizi employed for tasks such as removing boulders, clearing road access, fixing irrigation channels and feeding the community.
The Al Haouz earthquake has had a profound personal and professional impact on me, my life and my PhD research. Six months on, the space has given me time to reflect on the duty and obligation that we hold to our field site communities in times of crisis, as well as the invaluable role that ethnographic knowledge can play in humanitarian disasters and relief efforts. I believe that what happened in Al Haouz will remain with me, shaping the course of my future career and relationship with the communities there, just as it will shape their futures. One day in October we jumped at the noise of a passing lorry. My friend Nawal, Abdelhakim's sister, remarked: ‘the earthquake may have passed, but it is always with us in our minds’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).