Compassion is difficult to export. An earthquake shakes Pakistan and kills more than 40,000 people, but words cannot adequately describe that to someone thousands of miles away.

After hearing the news of the 7.6 magnitude quake in Pakistan on Oct. 8, Maddassar Ishaq, of Roanoke, phoned his mother and his four children in Faisalabad. The walls had started "walking," his oldest son told him; the earth shook like "a cloth on a wire."

"I can't understand only by listening," Ishaq said Tuesday, sitting in the yellow taxicab he drives around the Roanoke Valley. "I talked yesterday on my computer with my family. They told me that it's a huge difference between describing that place" and visiting it.

So where words fail, he has made travel plans. The slender, 45-year-old Pakistani man will fly into Lahore, Pakistan, next week to see, and then perhaps understand, the disaster. He will arrive in a country where the count of the dead seems to grow every day.

Ishaq plans to see Islamabad, the capital. He will see his family in Faisalabad, the city where he was born. He will head north to the hard-suffering Kashmir region, where he has heard a large wedding party was crushed while they slept.

"Stones fall from mountains into the valley. They just demolished everything," he said.

"I haven't seen that kind of earthquake in my life before. You got a little bit shaken that's all. Everybody said, 'That was an earthquake, that was an earthquake.' "

Ishaq said that unexpected rain and snow had complicated the recovery.

Along with a cousin in New Jersey, Ishaq has collected donations from both Pakistani and American friends. The money they raised, Ishaq estimated as much as $25,000, was wired to Faisalabad and used to buy truckloads of blankets, water and tents.

Ishaq also helped with relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina hit, donating money and water to a friend who was driving his truck down to the Gulf states, he said.

He has lived in Roanoke for the past three years. Ishaq said the valley resembles Islamabad; both are "neat and clean" and in green mountains, he said.

A widower, he dates "an American girl" who is learning to speak Urdu and how to cook some Pakistani dishes. But when he goes to Pakistan next week, he will travel alone.

"She realized this is not the time to go with me," Ishaq said.