This week I met a Sudanese refugee named Abul Asal, Abu Asal who was the featured speaker at a Darfur advocacy event in New York City. Abu Asal currently teaches English in Worcester, MA , where he moved after having escaped Sudan through Egypt. In Khartoum, Sudan, Asal was tortured and imprisoned for conducting peaceful protests against the Darfur genocide on his college campus. Asal spoke straight from the heart about his experiences in Darfur, his childhood, and the family that he left behind, expressing his pain as a genocide destroys the lives of millions just like him in his country. Watching him speak, I couldn't even look him in the eyes. I felt like I had betrayed him.

A few years ago I considered myself a Darfur activist, a college student mobilizing my campus to fight genocide. I gave impassioned speeches across the country and believed that a population would be saved because of my actions. Each night of lost sleep was a small sacrifice when I considered the lives I was saving. Each time I missed class to raise awareness about Darfur I was choosing heroism over the banal existence of a college student. I took a personal approach to healing the suffering in Darfur, to the point where I once begged my father to let me adopt a refugee and keep him in our small Manhattan apartment. My father would not tolerate my impractical and childish ideas. But all I wanted was to help and save. Or maybe I wanted to be a savior. Regardless of the root of my intentions, my actions were good.

Four years later, the genocide rages on; millions of people are displaced, living in makeshift refugee camps with no food or shelter. Hundreds of thousands have been brutally murdered. Malnourishment and lack of education only add to the plight of the survivors. Though I work for American Jewish World Service, an organization dedicated to ending the genocide, I am not as talkative about the genocide as I used to be, and not as quick to respond to the Darfur petition emails. Now, when I meet money managers, I no longer blurt out, “Please divest from Chinese oil companies! You are funding a genocide!”

Though much progress has been made through advocacy and awareness campaigns, the world still cares too little about Darfur. The New York Times recently exposed that no country (the U.S. included) has heeded the United Nations' call for a multinational peacekeeping force in Darfur. The international community is simply too busy with other affairs.

Most Americans still do not know what or where Darfur is. The Americans who do know don't care enough to fight for the Darfuri people beyond their yearly rally attendance. And my question is: why? How, in a world of globalization and Google E arth, does the plight of Darfuri refugees not haunt us and spur us to action?

After hearing Abu Asal, I tried to imagine myself in his shoes, exposing my soul to urge people to act. I imagined having to relive physical torture and losing my home in front of a group of strangers. I imagined believing for a split second that this speech would help save my family from death—only to go home and acknowledge for the hundredth time that my speech had done nothing. It had moved people for a few minutes, until they went back to their shopping, their Starbucks, and their cell phones, while my sisters across the world were gang raped.

Why does an impassioned speech or a heart-wrenching documentary affect me but not compel the masses? And why have I, with my conviction and passion, lost my drive to compel them?

I am tired of feeling responsibility and guilt for a nation so far away. I am tired of feeling that my actions aren't making the difference that I want them to make. I am tired of watching my friends and family care about Darfur one day and forget it the next.

I have seen three Darfur documentaries over the course of the past year, and in each film I am affected most by refugees crying. Unlike the pictures of dead bodies, which leave me numb, the firsthand accounts and displays of emotion move me. It is the experience of relating to the displaced people of Darfur that motivates my activism. Perhaps the activist community should work harder to humanize the stories, the numbers, and the faces. Or perhaps the activists have tried every angle and our community and society will never care the way they should. But the optimist in me still refuses to believe that.

The psychologist Paul Slovic researched why genocides have been allowed to occur repeatedly throughout history. He writes: “Confronted with knowledge of dozens of apparently random disasters each day, what can a human heart do but slam its doors…We didn't evolve to cope with tragedy on a global scale. Our defense is to pretend there's no thread of event that connects us, and that those lives are somehow not precious and real like our own. It's a practical strategy, to some ends, but the loss of empathy is also the loss of humanity, and that's no small tradeoff.”

It is our responsibility to reclaim our humanity, to prove to Paul Slovic and other psychologists that our hearts do not have to slam their doors. We have the potential to disprove their studies and empathize with hundreds of thousands of people we do not know in Darfur, Sudan.

And it is my responsibility to lose sleep again.

My hope is that, even if I can sleep tomorrow night, someone reading this article will toss and turn. Because the least we can do, not as activists but as human beings, is to care so much it hurts.