MOLI VIEW™

First, let me say that at least 3,000 people are dead and as many as 7 million more are in desperate need after Cyclone Sidr smashed through Bangladesh last week. Cyclones (known as hurricanes in other parts of the world) regularly whip this Muslim country, killing more than half a million people in 1970 and nearly 150,000 in 1991. The Bangladeshi government set up a cyclone center with a national warning system after the disaster in 1970, but the extreme poverty of much of the population leaves the millions who live in bamboo huts and tin shacks vulnerable.

The Bangladesh Red Crescent Society is asking the world for $5.7 million to help those in rural areas who have been left homeless and with a limited supply of food and water that will soon run out. I've been having a hard time getting into the BRCS site (hopefully traffic is heavy with donations flooding in), and neither the American Red Cross nor the International Red Cross seem to have any appeals for Bangladesh up just yet (!), so if you would like to help out, you can do so right now at CARE or World Vision.

One young man is doing even more than making an online donation on behalf of Bangladesh. Identifying himself simply as Shawn, a 26-year-old Canadian and erstwhile grad student from Notre Dame, he traveled to the disaster-prone country after hearing a speech by Jeffrey Sachs in September 2006. When the economist, author, and former director of the UN Millenium Project told an audience of the Fighting Irish that ending poverty was their "homework," Shawn took the assignment to heart. Taking a leave from his studies, "I bought a camera, grabbed my computer, and flew to Bangladesh to see if I could make a difference,'' he says on his website The Uncultured Project.

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