From Roscrea to Noorgal: When an Earthquake Travels by Phone
When the phone lit up late one night in Roscrea, County Tipperary, it carried a different kind of time and place. The messages were short, urgent, and impossible to make sense of at first: a deep rumble, houses crumbling, people running into the dark. For Raoof Safi, 17 years in Ireland could not mute the sound of a homeland being torn apart.
“I felt every message like a small earthquake in my chest,” Raoof told me over a steaming mug of tea in his modest home. “You are 7,000 kilometres away but your ears are glued to every voice on the line. You listen to how someone cries, and you try to count the cost.”
The tremor he was hearing about struck the Noorgal District in Kunar province at roughly 11:45pm on 31 August — a 6.0 magnitude quake, according to local reports. Taliban authorities put the human toll in the thousands, saying thousands had been killed and thousands more injured. For families already battered by poverty, conflict and isolation, the numbers translate into a very simple cruelty: roofs that collapsed on sleeping children, walls that gave way while families lay in bed, and, in many places, entire villages rendered unlivable.
Stories You Can’t Ignore
Raoof’s phone became a conduit for grief. First came the disorienting accounts — a neighbour’s voice, breathless; a cousin sending shaky video from beneath a tarp. Then came the lists of names. In the days after, the hazy tally of loss hardened into reality: members of his extended family among the dead.
“I remember when my uncle called. He kept saying, ‘We have nothing. The house is nothing. The walls, they have fallen,’” Raoof said. “The thing that haunts me is that we had no time. People woke up and the ceilings were on them.”
Not every story carried the same shape of sorrow. Sangar Hashimi, a journalist who has worked for Kabul’s 1TV Media and insists on returning to report from remote valleys, described scenes that read like pages from a cruel, intimate novel.
“I stood in front of a mass grave and counted blankets instead of bodies,” Sangar said. “A man told me he lost 14 members of his family. A little girl I filmed was the only one left in her household. These are not numbers on a map. They are the faces I have known.”
Homes of Mud and Memory
Across Kunar, many dwellings are built of mud-brick and unreinforced stone, materials that are cheap and available but unforgiving under seismic stress. When the ground moves, these homes do not flex — they fall.
“We built our houses like our fathers did, with mud and stone,” said Abdul Hadi Sarwari, who watched his home in Bar Noorgal village tilt and then collapse. “Now we sleep in the open. Twenty-two of us are on my uncle’s farm. We sit under trees at night. If the wind comes, it feels like everything could be taken again.”
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar makeshift encampments across the affected valleys, where families have clumped together on fields and hillsides to escape the shadow of another aftershock. Tents are scarce; many are simply too remote to have received emergency supplies in the first days. Children play amid rubble, their games edged with a new fragility.
Winter Is Coming — and So Is the Hardest Test
The calendar is more than a convenience in Afghanistan’s highlands. Winter can be a matter of survival. Temperatures in these parts routinely fall below freezing; when snow comes, isolated communities can be cut off for weeks. For the displaced, the threat is immediate and sharp.
“When you lose your home before winter,” said Dr. Leila Mahmoud, who has worked with humanitarian agencies in eastern Afghanistan, “you lose your shield against the cold. Blankets and stoves are good, but they are tiny bandages when entire villages have been leveled. Hypothermia, chest infections, diarrhoea—these are the next wave.”
Humanitarian access is a familiar problem here: steep terrain, narrow footpaths, and intermittent communications make relief operations slow and costly. Aid workers who did reach the worst-hit communities had to walk long distances, sometimes for days, carrying food, blankets and medical supplies on their backs.
Voices That Won’t Be Silenced
Closer to home in Ireland, Raoof has become something of an informal coordinator — a son who wants to speak for those whose words cannot cross the mountains. “I feel responsible,” he said. “Not because I am heroic, but because I can call, I can write, and other people can hear.”
Across the world, that voice matters. It pushes a story beyond an item in a newsfeed and into the messy, human work of response: donations, pressure on decision-makers, and the steady churn of journalists and aid workers trying to reach the inaccessible.
“We must not only mourn,” Sangar added quietly. “We must remember that rebuilding is a moral choice. Who will help rebuild those homes when attention moves on?”
Why This Scares Us — and Should Make Us Think
There are broader lessons here. Natural disasters rarely occur in isolation; they intersect with politics, poverty and neglect. In Afghanistan, decades of conflict have left infrastructure weak and social services fragmented. When the earth moves, it finds those fault lines and exploits them.
Ask yourself: how would your community fare if a quake hit tonight? Do you have the social safety nets, the infrastructure, and the will to rebuild equitably? These are uncomfortable questions, but the kind worth asking.
What People Need Now
- Immediate shelter: tents, tarpaulins, warm blankets.
- Food and clean water: to prevent disease and malnutrition.
- Medical care: for the injured and for those at risk from hypothermia and infection.
- Longer-term aid: materials and tools to rebuild safer homes, and psychosocial support for trauma.
Local leaders, relief workers and diaspora communities are trying to respond. But resources are finite. Voices like Raoof’s can help translate grief into action.
Where Do We Go From Here?
If you find yourself moved by these stories, consider supporting well-established humanitarian organizations that operate in Afghanistan and the region. Small gestures—donations, raising awareness, or even urging your local representative to support humanitarian channels—can expand the circle of care.
Raoof himself is carrying a quieter mission. “When I speak about Noorgal,” he told me as dusk pooled in his living room, “I am carrying my childhood with me. I want people to see the fields where we played, not just the collapsed walls. I want them to know that when houses fall, memories fall too.”
Earthquakes rearrange landscapes, but they also reconfigure obligations. They force distant relatives to become advocates, neighbours to share what little they have, and the international community to choose whether it will answer. In the weeks and months ahead, the real measure of this crisis will not be the headline figure on day one, but how many lives are made whole again.
What would you do if a single phone call could mean the difference between being heard and being forgotten?
