On Wednesday morning, the people of al-Sharif lined the main street, forming a guard of honour for the ambulances making their way to the village cemetery. This community in northern Egypt is almost 560 miles (900km) away from Derna, the Libyan city at the centre of this week’s floods, but it has been devastated by the disaster.
Seventy-four people from al-Sharif, all of them men between the ages of 18 and 30, are known to have lost their lives in the floods. They were working in Libya in the hope of making some money to build a better life back home.
As we walk through al-Sharif, house after house is holding a mourning ceremony.
Many of the dead and missing are from the same family. The al-Dabaa family, one of the largest in al-Sharif, is mourning the loss of 16 people.
“My three sons, all in their 20s, died,” says Jumaa al-Sayyid, a 50-year-old farmer, struggling to fight back the tears.