Each update Dina Yacoubagha gets from her family in Syria is more heartbreaking than the last.

It began Sunday night with a message from her sister in Latakia, a city on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, describing an awful earthquake and asking for prayers. Over the next two days, the messages chronicled the increasing misery, chaos and frantic efforts to track down all of her extended family.

“They tell me you hear people screaming and crying from the rubble of their homes,” said Yacoubagha, who serves on the Bangor City Council.

On Wednesday came the news they all feared: her second cousin, his wife and their three children had died in the coastal city of Jableh. Their bodies were pulled from the wreckage of their apartment building, along with friends and neighbors Yacoubagha knew from her childhood.

“We used to be classmates, we used to be friends, we used to play together. All of them are dead and they’re recovering their bodies,” she said.

They’re now among the more than 15,000 people who have died after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake and powerful aftershocks hit the region on Monday morning, cutting a swath of destruction across hundreds of miles of Turkey and Syria.

For people in Maine with ties to the region, the devastating situation has left them feeling helpless.

The quake toppled thousands of buildings, trapping people under mounds of rubble. Search teams from nearly 30 countries are racing against time and freezing temperatures to pull survivors from the wreckage. The situation is especially dire in Syria, which already was dealing with a 12-year civil war and refugee crisis that left the region without the critical infrastructure to respond quickly to a crisis of this magnitude.

“It’s really scary to be here and know I can’t do anything. There’s isn’t anything I can physically do to help,” said Stephanie Dila Maloney, the chef-owner of the Turkish food stall Dila’s Kitchen at the Public Market House in Portland. She has family in Turkey, where she spent summers each year as a child.

There are many earthquakes in Turkey but “we can never really prepare for something this big,” Maloney said. Her family members are unharmed and have been giving her updates on the conditions around them. They describe buildings that are continuing to collapse and the need for basic supplies.

“The banks are down, there’s no internet, there’s no basic services,” she said. “I can’t even send them money in the disaster zone.”

But Maloney is able to send money to cousins outside the zone, who are bringing clothes and blankets to those in need. She plans to raise money and donate profits from her business to families in Turkey as they recover from the disaster.

COLLECTING SUPPLIES

When Tarlan Ahmadov, founder of the Azerbaijan Society of Maine, first heard about the devastating earthquake, he knew he wanted to do something to help. Many people in Maine’s Azerbaijani community have ties to Turkey, and the two countries are connected culturally, linguistically and religiously.

“We are two countries, but we are one nation,” he said.

The Azerbaijani community began collecting winter clothing, blankets and tents, joining a larger effort across the country to get those much-needed supplies to Turkey. The items collected in Maine will be brought to Boston on Friday, where they will be put on pallets and flown to Turkey by Turkish Airlines.

Partners for World Health, a Portland nonprofit, is raising money to expedite shipments of medical supplies to Syria and Turkey, which cost roughly $20,000 each time.

For the past eight years, the organization has been sending regular shipments to Syria. It plans to ship a container with nearly 30,000 pounds of supplies to Turkey in the next 10 days, which will then be trucked into Syria, said Elizabeth McLellan, who founded the nonprofit in 2007.

Another shipment is planned in the next couple of weeks, she said.

Shipments include a wide range of medical supplies – alcohol pads, wound-care supplies, surgical instruments. These are items that will be needed immediately and over the months to come.

“Their hospitals have also been hit in this crisis. All of those supplies are in the rubble,” McLellan said.

Yacoubagha, the Bangor city councilor, has been thinking of useful ways to support and help people in Syria. Because of the war, she said, there is no way to send money directly. When people ask her how to offer support, she suggests they donate to the Syrian American Medical Society, a global medical relief organization based in Washington, D.C.

She also has been asking people to set aside the politics of war and keep Syria in their thoughts and prayers.

“Right now it’s a humanitarian crisis,” she said. “People are dying under the rubble. People are dying of hunger. The situation is just so dire there and they need help and support.”

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