But there is little left of the villages in the region’s dusty hills besides rubble and funerals. In Naib Rafi, a village that previously had about 2500 residents, people said almost no one was still alive besides men who were working outside when the quake struck.
Survivors worked all day with excavators to dig long trenches for mass burials. On a barren field in the district of Zinda Jan, a bulldozer removed mounds of earth to clear space for a long row of graves.
”It is very difficult to find a family member from a destroyed house and a few minutes to later bury him or her in a nearby grave, again under the ground,” said Mir Agha, from the city of Herat, who had joined hundreds of volunteers to help the locals.
Nearly 2000 houses in 20 villages were destroyed, the Taliban have said. The area hit by the quakes has just one government-run hospital.
