By Yossef Ben-Meir, Fatima Zahra Laaribi, and Kaitlyn Waring Marrakech, Morocco
Lessons from Morocco’s September 2023 Earthquake
On June 24, 2026, two earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 struck northwestern Venezuela, only 39 seconds apart. The earthquakes were among the strongest to hit the country in more than a century, and within days, the death toll reached over 2,200 with more than 11,000 people injured and thousands unaccounted for. Rescue teams are continuing to dig through the wreckage, even as the country’s insatiable economic and political situation hinder recovery efforts. While the international community immediately responded with food, water, shelter, and medical aid, another profound and permeating question is surfacing: once the dust settles and the immediate danger passes, what happens to the emotional weight and trauma that people are carrying?
The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) faced this often unsuspecting question three years ago after the September 2023 earthquake that struck the Al Haouz province of Morocco. When urgency was at its height, HAF found an answer to this question not through a new program but within an existing methodology that had proven healing and empowerment benefits.
A Methodology Built Before the Catastrophe
Seven years before the earthquake, HAF began implementing the IMAGINE model in rural and urban communities in Morocco. Developed by the Empowerment Institute, IMAGINE is an empowerment methodology, but it is not designed from a disaster response perspective. Instead, its focus is on helping women build a stronger sense of self, clarity about what they want from their lives, and self-agency over their own futures. Remarkably, something else was developing alongside it that prepared HAF to be adaptable in the face of disaster: stronger bonds and existing relationships within communities, deeper solidarity among community members, and a group of trained facilitators who knew how to hold space for difficult and important conversations.
Having trained facilitators became the key to HAF’s earthquake response. When any disaster strikes, an organization’s ability to help depends heavily on who it was before the moment. For HAF, much of the trust-building and training work required was already done and put into practice. This enabled HAF to immediately deliver 100 psychosocial empowerment workshops that reached more than 4,000 women, men, and children across the earthquake-affected communities.
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Even before the earthquake, certain IMAGINE activities were laying the foundation to build more than confidence through conversations that expose real pain. A breathing exercise meant to help people relax and envision their futures often opened the door to expressing long-held fears related to poverty, harmful familial relationships, and other socioeconomic issues. A pairing activity called the Tunnel Exercise, where one participant guides another through imagining a difficult passage in their life, regularly uncovered stories of abuse and loss that people had never had a safe space to name. Workshops on spirituality that were meant to explore personal purpose often turned into open evaluations of feelings of not being enough. Looking at these experiences now, it is clear that the connection between empowerment work and trauma healing was always there, able to be used when the moment arose.
When the Earthquake Came
After the earthquake, when Project HOPE approached HAF to ask about implementing their psychosocial healing program, our team looked at our own IMAGINE methodology and quickly realized the similarities between the two. IMAGINE required some adaptation, some tailoring to a post-disaster context, but we did not have to start from scratch.
Work and money, for example, topics that IMAGINE normally addressed, were removed from the schedule to prioritize more fitting themes. The support system exercise was renamed SADEEQA (“friend” in Arabic) and given far more room for open expression by participants; once a smaller piece of a larger self-esteem module in IMAGINE, it became a centerpiece of the discussion after the earthquake. Body-focused sessions shifted from nutrition and movement towards hygiene, a pressing need for people who shared crowded tents without adequate water or toilets. Storytelling was also given more time and less structure, favoring unfiltered expression of trauma rather than quickly moving towards solutions. In psychosocial workshops, the storytelling of trauma often was a critical component of the solution.
At the same time, not every activity translated clearly, emphasizing the need for context-specific adaption. The Rooms exercise, for example, which asked participants to close their eyes and imagine a space of their own, became difficult in the reality where many women felt that closing their eyes for long periods of time brought them back to the moment of the earthquake.
The Important Stories That Surfaced
Sometimes what emerged from the workshops had nothing directly to do with the earthquake at all. A young woman used the space to talk for the first time about her marriage, in which her husband and in-laws mistreated her and left her living alone in a tent. Older wounds, including childhood sexual harassment and years of emotional abuse, surfaced among the fresh grief of the disaster. One woman, who had been one of the quietest participants of the IMAGINE workshops, became the most outspoken participant in the psychosocial workshops once she was given the space to grieve her father, killed in the earthquake, and process her fear for her injured son. She cried for the first time.
A Way Forward for Venezuela
The clearest lesson learned from Morocco isn’t one specific activity but rather the sequencing and timing of preparedness. Material aid such as food, blankets, clean water, and food, is essential and urgent, but isn’t sufficient on its own. Organizations on the ground in Venezuela are pairing emergency support with psychosocial support and child protection services, recognizing the same lesson: people need a place to express their grief before they can meaningfully plan a future.
An equally important takeaway is that HAF’s methodology worked in crisis because it was tested, trusted, and staffed with trained facilitators for years before. While existing psychosocial infrastructure in Venezuela may be scaled-back under the broader issues facing the country, it is likely to be the crux of recovery efforts in the months and years ahead.
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Yossef Ben-Meir is the President of the High Atlas Foundation (HAF), a nonprofit Moroccan-American organization dedicated to sustainable development. At HAF, Fatima Zahra Laaribi is the Lead Empowerment Trainer and Kaitlyn Waring is a Program Manager.
