ALEPPO, Syria, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- Piles of earthquake debris gave Ali Abdul-Rahman, a survivor in northern Syria, a harsh flashback to the near-death second when he escaped a crumbling wall at home, and how the wall shared by two buildings kept friends and neighbors part.
In Masharqa, a neighborhood in the northern city of Aleppo, Ali Abdul-Rahman, together with his family of two kids and pregnant wife, found themselves alive after the disaster hit in the early hours of Feb. 6.
Their home remains standing, but behind a shared wall was an adjoining building destroyed in the quakes. Most of its residents didn't survive.
"This is how far we are from the end: a wall and a few seconds," the 55-year-old man told Xinhua.
The entire family was asleep as the tremor hit before dawn. Waking up to the horrifying shaking, Abdul-Rahman grabbed the kids and his wife and rushed to the doors.
On their way out, a couple of seconds felt like hours while they were trying to grasp what was going on, particularly the apocalyptic view of the total collapse of the other doomed building attached to theirs by the wall.
Somehow they managed to reach the street. It was raining heavily that day, and they couldn't see clearly what had befallen their area as they sought to hide from the harsh weather in a nearby park, where they spent the next day before they were able to return.
Upon returning, they found the entire facade had been torn off, and the upper floors of the six-floor building were heavily damaged.
The shock didn't end for Abdul-Rahman. Upon noticing his friends and neighbors were buried under the rubble of the destroyed building, he took part in the rescue mission and dug along with some neighbors.
They managed to pull out dead bodies from under the rubble of people with whom they had spent a lifetime. It was a scene he said he would never forget.
"The (Syrian) war didn't affect us like this. The earthquake affected us 50 times more than the war, and it's hard to forget. Such things are hard to forget," he said with a sigh of weariness.
On his way out, all he could think about was how to deliver his two kids to safety and how to protect his pregnant wife, and how desperate and scared they would be when the roof fell on them, he recalled.
Now, Abul-Rahman returned to his home even though the building needed fixing and his house was hardly livable without the support of a wall, but there is nothing left they could have done.
"People just wanted a shelter to sleep in. I am a laborer. I make so little every day. It's difficult for me to secure food to feed my children and buy them cloth or even fix my house," Abdul-Rahman said.
His plan for the future is to help his children overcome the trauma and understand that life is so fragile that it can change in seconds.
Produced by Xinhua Global Service■
