A Kiwi in Morocco lost her home, neighbours and community members in the 6.8 magnitude Morocco earthquake that has taken nearly 3,000 lives thus far, but she has not lost her willpower or faith in her community.
Amanda Hartford joined Breakfast this morning to tell her story and share the recovery efforts she has seen on the ground.
Sitting outside on the terrace of her home in the Atlas Mountains, near the epicentre of the "horrific" quake, she said the first wave sounded akin to a warzone and scared her animals away.
She knew something was coming, but all she could do was hold tight and pray.
"All I could say was 'don't let me house fall down on me, don't let my house fall down on me'. All of my house fell down except for where I was," she said.
Holding back tears and her voice cracking, she described the unthinkable tragedy the earthquake put her neighbour through.
"My next door neighbour has five children. We've removed them, we buried them yesterday. He has no home. He has nothing, he's by himself. No home, no family."
With no electricity available, Harford went to the city of Marrakech the next day to make contact with her father and sister, solely to say that she loved them.
"I've had no contact with anybody, we have no electricity, we have nothing."
She said the last few days have been "horrible, but amazing at the same time" because of the rapid humanitarian support from Moroccan authorities.
"The most important thing I have not said is how fantastic and amazing the Moroccan Government and the Moroccan authorities have been. They have been incredible. This happened just after 11 o'clock at night, I'm in a very remote village up the Atlas Mountains, so every convoy ... were coming through within two hours, and that's incredible.
"The helicopters are above us, every two seconds the helicopters are circling to find [collapsed dwellings] ... whether the bodies are alive or dead, they've got the facility to see this. If they are deceased, they move on to find the alive."
Alongside the French Foreign Legion, her goal is to assist in the recovery process and begin rebuilding everything that was lost in just moments.
"Every moment I'm on the phone and I'm trying to eliminate ... what we don't need. The problem now is people don't have homes, where part of what [we] want to do ... we're going in to remove the debris and make things safe, so that we can actually create foundations of houses again."
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