Day 1, Friday

Darkness gives way to dawn… It’s three in the morning as we land at the Zia International Airport in Dhaka. Thankfully, there is electricity here but reports coming in have suggested that most of Dhaka is having to do without it. The infrastructure of the city of 11 million is still recovering from the battering it took just a few days before.

I arrived at the hotel in Dhaka at 4 in the morning, grabbed a few hours’ sleep then started work right away with a meeting from 9.30 onwards. By the time I arrived, our partner in Bangladesh, the Resource Integration Centre (RIC) had already been responding to the disaster. Within four days of the cyclone they had distributed dry food rations to over 2,000 families. I started by attending briefings from Haseeb Khan, the Executive Director and Razeeb Tutul, the Programme Manager of RIC, who introduced me to their staff team.

Based on initial assessments RIC has identified 65,000 older people and their families who are in need of assistance to meet their basic needs (health, food, water and shelter) and support to rebuild their businesses and lives following the devastation. It will be a real challenge to raise enough money to help these vulnerable older people. To increase coordination and make our response more effective we are planning to partner with other organisations.

Already there are reports of outbreaks of diarrhoea and other health concerns in the national newspapers today.

Even though the field team has been working flat out, with very little sleep, packaging relief items into boxes all night and distributing them in the day, their commitment to our mission is still as strong as ever.

RIC and HelpAge International will be integrating disaster risk reduction with our response and hopefully in the future this will reduce the impact of such disasters. We are now also preparing for a visit by a photographer who will spend a few days visiting project areas in order to collect photos and stories so that we can get word of this tremendous tragedy out to the world.