A Spaniard, in the Moroccan earthquake: “Fear sets in when things start to calm down” | International

Sebastián Martínez, from Madrid, 24 years old and a hotelier by profession, was walking on Friday night with his girlfriend, Madjiguene Mbow, a Valencian nurse, 25, through Marrakech, where they are spending a few days on vacation. They could not know that in a few minutes both of them were going to play a great role in helping the first victims of the earthquake. They were on the main street of the medina (old city), a five-minute walk from the famous main square of Jemaa el Fna. Suddenly, at 11:11 p.m. (an hour later in mainland Spain), the ground began to shake and everyone was screaming and running. “Everything happened very quickly,” he remembers this Saturday morning in a telephone conversation from Marrakech. “Beyond the shaking of the ground, and I heard a sound like a machine gun, a sound of ta, ta, ta…. I guess it would be the falling stones or the gas bombs. But we thought it was an attack.”

The couple's first reaction was to escape from the main street of the medina, because there were many people. “We went into a five-foot alley. And there, seeing the walls fall, is when we realized that it was an earthquake,” Martínez continues. They decided to return to the square, but shortly before reaching a mosque whose minaret would end up falling, they noticed a man lying on the ground who did not stop screaming.

“My girlfriend,” explains Martínez, “has a master's degree in emergencies and critical patients.” “While she was treating him, an English couple joined us, both military, and she was a military nurse. They treated the injured man and together we held him on a metal fence, we crossed the entire square shouting at people to move away until we reached the police station in the square. There we took a piece of wood and a handkerchief to stabilize the man's leg."

A few meters from the Spanish couple, a French doctor and his friend were caring for other patients in the square. “At that moment it would have been a quarter to twelve. A Greek doctor soon arrived and the four health workers there began to attend to all the patients, while the rest of us coordinated with the police to cordon off the area, because there were many curious people.”

Sebastián Martínez is full of praise for the police in the square and the Moroccans who helped them translate and treat the wounded. “Ambulances came and we put as many injured people as possible in each one. Local people brought us water and ice. A boy came with his broken arm hanging. I took off my shirt and tore it to hold his arm. I think we loaded the first three ambulances with five people. In total, we treated about 40 injured people. We didn't see any dead. Although there are people with an open skull”.

Martínez and the rest of the improvised relief team divided the square into two areas to look for people who were in bad condition and take them to the point where they were examining the wounded. “Then people began to arrive from deep within the medina. Two boys arrived who had a lot of trouble breathing because they had swallowed a lot of dust. After a while, two Moroccan women who lived in Belgium and spoke English came. One of them is a pediatrician and both of them also started caring for people.”

Fear for the replica

At 3:30 the square began to empty. “At that moment Red Crescent vehicles arrived and went to look for injured people in other areas,” says Martínez. “The local police told us that there was a risk of the earthquake repeating itself at six in the morning. We went to look for people, to warn them not to enter their houses. "We remembered what happened in Turkey, that the second earthquake was worse than the first."

After touring part of the medina they returned to the square. And then, they saw the boy whose arm Sebastián Martínez had held with his shirt, who already had his arm in a cast. “The little boy hugged us all. And my girlfriend says that was the best of the night.

The police thanked the improvised Western rescuers for their help. “We called our riad, but no one picked up the phone. We didn't want to walk back through the streets of the medina. We waited until seven in the medina. And we went in a taxi to see if he was still standing. Everything was intact. Fear sets in when things begin to calm down, when you begin to rationalize what you have experienced,” reflects the young man from Madrid.

Martínez and Madjiguene Mbow tried to return to Spain on the first scheduled flight, but there were no places available on Saturday morning. “We have rested for a couple of hours and now we will go out into the street, because we fear that there may be an aftershock,” explains Martínez this Saturday morning. ”In reality,” he adds, “I didn't do much more for the wounded than be attentive, push people aside and bring what they needed. The real heroes were the two doctors, the Greek and the French, and my girlfriend, Madji, and the other nurse.” And he concludes: “We did it without any medical equipment: we had no bandages, no heart rate monitor, no oxygen, no auscultation device. We managed as best we could.”

Follow all the international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.