When stones fell from the sky: The night time an Afghan village was destroyed | Earthquakes

Just a few metres away from the piles of stones that have been as soon as the primary properties as you entered their small village, three males sat on a conventional woven mattress.

Considered one of them was Hayat’s cousin, Mehboob.

“When the earthquake occurred, my 13-year-old son Nasib Ullah was sleeping subsequent to me. I wakened, acquired off the bed, and began in search of the torch. Then, out of the blue, the entire room moved from the falling rocks. Once I tried to achieve my son, the wall and the ground slid down, and I couldn’t catch him,” the 36-year-old defined.

“[It was] worse than the day of judgement.”

“Homes collapsed, boulders from the mountain got here crumbling down; you couldn’t see something, we couldn’t see one another.”

Everybody was injured, he defined. Some had damaged ribs and damaged legs.

“At the hours of darkness, we took our youngsters who have been nonetheless alive to the farmland beneath, the place it was safer from the boulders.”

That night time, he counted greater than 250 tremors, he stated: aftershocks that proceed to shake the valley even weeks after the earthquake.

When daylight got here, he tried to dig by the rubble to seek out his family members. “However my physique didn’t need to work,” he stated.

“I may see my son’s foot, however the remainder of his physique had disappeared beneath the rubble.”

His 10-year-old daughter, Aisha, had additionally been killed.

“It was the worst second of my life,” he stated.

It took two days for villagers and volunteers to get better the our bodies.

When Hayat’s brother, Rahmat Gul, obtained a message from his brother telling him that the complete village was gone, he instantly rushed there from his residence in Parwan province, some 300km (185 miles) away.

When he lastly reached Aurak Dandila, the surviving villagers requested him to wrap Mehboob’s useless son in a blanket.

“Mehboob requested me to point out him the face of his son, however I couldn’t do it,” Rahmat Gul defined as Mehboob, sitting beside him, regarded out over the farmland within the valley beneath.

Close by, Hayat stood up and started pacing.

“God has taken my sons from me, and now I really feel like I’ve left this world as nicely,” he stated.

In Aurak Dandila, a small cornfield has turn out to be a graveyard. “Right here is the place we buried our family members,” Hayat stated. The graves are marked by stones.

He remembers how he had urged Abdul Haq to remain within the village. “The following day, every part was gone, and he misplaced his life.”

Now, Hayat believes, “there’s nothing left to dwell right here for”.

“How can I proceed residing right here?” he requested, pointing on the particles of what was as soon as his residence.

“The stones are coming from above; how can anybody dwell on this village?”

“We are going to settle someplace else, and we are going to search for the mercy of God. If he has no mercy on us, then we can even die.”