Every time Abdulrahman Al-Dahhan closes his eyes at night, he hears the screams of friends and family in Syria pleading for help.
The voice messages he’s received chronicling their pain make it impossible to sleep, he says. Haunted by their cries, he lies awake tormented by guilt. He worries that each moment he rests, thousands back home in Syria are still buried alive under rubble.
More than 33,000 people have died across Turkey and Syria since a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the region on February 6. Nearly a week later, a lucky few are still being pulled alive from the rubble but hopes of finding additional survivors dwindle amid freezing temperatures.
“It’s destroying me,” Al-Dahhan, 31, told CNN. “When it happened, I was receiving constant voice messages, jumping from number to number on WhatsApp, each one is someone crying, telling me they are seeing people dying around them. I can’t stop hearing them.”
Al-Dahhan, a Syrian-American aid worker for Mercy-USA, a Michigan-based non-profit working in communities across the globe, has spent the past week traveling around the United States to raise money for earthquake relief. So far, he says he has raised $100,000 by fundraising at schools, places of worship and efforts on social media.
Meanwhile, on the ground, his colleagues who survived have been in a race against time, using the funds raised by workers like Al-Dahhan to help rescue those still trapped under the rubble and deliver relief to shell-shocked survivors.
Since the earthquake, Al-Dahhan says he has not properly eaten and can’t sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time, the exhaustion evident in his voice.
“At least I get a little bit of relief, knowing what I’m doing matters, because the more I can fundraise here, the more it helps out there,” he said. “But I am in constant stress that I’m not doing enough and I need to keep going. When I sleep, I feel guilty. I need to be awake every second. I need to be working. I want to get more updates. I feel like I’m operating here, but my mind and soul are there.”
He describes in detail the photos he’s seen from the ground and recites story after story of the horrors that keep him up at night. One of them is about a colleague who crawled out of the rubble with his 5-month-old baby and returned to save his wife and daughters, desperately digging in the freezing rain for two days until they were rescued.
Another story is about a family that lost two sisters in the earthquake, leaving their children orphaned. When their brother learned of his sisters’ deaths, Al-Dahhan says, he suffered a heart attack from the shock and died – also leaving