UNL grad raising money for Bangladesh cyclone victims

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By MELISSA LEE / Lincoln Journal Star

Omar Azad can only hope the night of Nov. 16 is one he’ll never have to re-live.

It was a nightmare: Outside his home in Bangladesh, the wind whipped so hard he thought his glass windows would shatter.

It was dark and the power was out, so he couldn’t turn on the news to find out what was happening. He saw leaves, trees, even a rickshaw fly by.

Rain poured down.

“It was just so scary,” remembered Azad, 25, a 2006 University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate in economics.

He knows now he’s lucky to have made it through the night unharmed. Cyclone Sidr had struck Bangladesh’s coast, killing more than 3,000 people, injuring more than 5,000 and leaving many more without homes, jobs, food and medicine.

Now Azad is taking action.

With the help of his Atlanta-based office, M2SYS Technology, for which he is a marketing analyst, Azad has set up a Web site encouraging people to open their wallets for the battered country.

The Web site, www.helpthemsurvive.org, includes testimonials from survivors, videos and photos chronicling the storm and multiple ways to help Bangladesh, a small Asian country the American Red Cross says is one of the most disaster-prone in the world.

More than a week after Cyclone Sidr, Azad said, the country still is in recovery mode, with residents sleeping on mud streets, damaged infrastructure and rapidly spreading disease from bodies strewn everywhere.

“We are in need immediately,” he said. “Every minute that we postpone, the death toll increases.”

Some of Azad’s relatives were hospitalized after the storm, though none were killed. And the village where he lives fared better than others that were destroyed.

Still, he heard numerous tales of destruction, like the man who tried to save his child during the cyclone, only to watch his house collapse on his wife and mother, or the farmer who went outside to check his crops and found dead bodies on the ground.

“It’s a sad story,” Azad said.

Donated money will help build shelters for the homeless, he said, and medicate the sick. The country also needs help repairing roads and buildings.

Recovery — physical and emotional — could take a long time, Azad said.

“What about those people that saw their things flying away?” he said. “The pictures that I saw, you can see their eyes. You can see the fear that went through their eyes.”

Reach Melissa Lee at 473-2682 or mlee@journalstar.com.