Rachid Alachoun, a 40-year-old plumber, washes clothes on the roof of his home. Half of it remains standing while the other half can be found in piles of rocks visible from the roof.
Alachoun is among the survivors near the epicentre of an earthquake that hit Morocco last Friday. Authorities have reported 2,946 deaths and several thousand injuries.Though he has to walk through boulders and wires to get to his kitchen or bedroom, he has stayed in his family's home in Amizmiz near the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter. He said the tent that authorities gave them is too small for his entire family.
"They told us not to come to get supplies and that supplies would come. So we waited," Alachoun's sister, Loubna, said from the coated polyester tent she is sharing with another brother, father, mother and a close family friend. Now her entire neighborhood has relocated to a corner of a tent city in the center of town. She worries about the future for her five children -- ages 25, 20, 19, 14 and 10 -- some of whom had just started school last week.
UNICEF, the United Nations agency that provides aid for children, estimated this week that roughly 100,000 children "have been impacted by the powerful earthquake." The figure follows an earlier U.N. estimate that 300,000 people were affected by the disaster. About one-third of the population in Morocco is children.
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