Our History
The Bangladesh Relief Fund was founded in the summer of 2004. The following letter, written by BRF's founder Mr. Muhit Rahman, explains the origin of the fund.
Cincinnati, Ohio
August 2004
Every year, for the past decade or so, I have tried to visit Bangladesh, the country of my forefathers, the country where I was born some 48 years ago. I go there to visit my aging mother and remind her that she still has a son who loves and respects her (my father is buried in Los Angeles). I go there to share a bit of the material success that I have enjoyed since becoming an American. And I go there to remind my children of our heritage as well as to teach them compassion and lend them social perspective. And I go there most often during summer.
Summer is the season of the monsoons -- the renewing rain that renders the land fertile and yields the bountiful harvests of rice that drew settlers to this young land some thousands of years ago. In careful concert with the rain and the floods, farmers plant their Aman seedlings so the young rice plant can rise and flourish with the rising flood waters. Too much water and the plants can drown, too little and they can wither from thirst. But the farmers and the rice plant are both resilient, and over the past three decades, Bangladesh has confounded critics by being largely absent from world headlines. In spite of doubling its population since its inception, Bangladesh has managed to attain self-sufficiency in food. And occasionally, when the floods wander out of control, the country has silently rescued its own people. But occasionally, nature chooses not to be tamed.
This year, I spent the middle two weeks of July in Bangladesh. While visiting with my mother is always fulfilling, my visit this year coincided with some of the worst flooding that the country has seen in decades. Although home for several weeks, I have not been able to put aside the images and stories of misery that I saw and experienced and I feel compelled to do something about it.
Bangladesh is a delta (a flood plain), and like most deltas, is prone to natural annual flooding. Each year, about a quarter to a third of the country is submerged under the monsoon rains that wash down from the Himalayas. The warm, moisture-laden air from the Indian Ocean races across the flat plains of Bangladesh and India and runs smack into the Himalayas at the northern edge. Rising rapidly with the terrain, the air cools and is forced to shed its load of moisture in the form of torrential rains. A few miles from Bangladesh’s north-eastern edge, the Indian town of Cherapunji claims to be the rainiest place on earth with over 800 inches of average annual rainfall. All that water has to head back to the sea. And head back it does -- through a dense network of rivers that, in the myths of Hindu theology, are the gods themselves. While constituting about 7% of the Ganges-Brahmaputra catch basin, 92% of the water flows through Bangladesh on its way to the Bay of Bengal. For several millennia the floods have brought an annual re-silting of the land that maintains or rejuvenates its fertility. But in recent years, the floods have also brought untold misery.
This year, water claimed almost two-thirds of the country. This means that, in addition to homesteads, the so-called ‘high ground’ (mainly roads and embankments) where people traditionally escape to is also under water. While I was there, I drove on the main north-south highway which was already under a foot of water in many places. Many of those roads were at one point under five feet or more of water. Belongings that had been salvaged from the initial flood have been washed away. Poor people leading marginal lives were forced to sell their livestock--chickens, goats, and cows--at fire-sale prices or watch them float away. While deaths were mercifully lower than those from a more sudden event such as a hurricane or tidal wave, they have occurred. And to compound the distress, in many regions there is no dry spot to bury the dead. The misery that is yet to come is not so much for the abject poor -- they lived day-to-day before the floods and will do the same afterwards -- but for the next tier, the struggling poor. These people have seen their meager net-worths of $100-$500 drown in the raging flood waters along with their hopes and dreams. Over 30 million people were rendered at least temporarily homeless.
Over my two decades in the financial services industry, I have raised funds for hundreds of businesses. Some produced great returns, some mediocre ones, and a few proved quite unworthy. And over the years, we have all recognized that the best returns are not always financial. In furtherance of that thought and in light of recent events and my personal connection with Bangladesh, I have decided to try to raise $1 million for the distressed poor of Bangladesh. I hope to use about half of what I raise for immediate, short-term relief and half for longer term projects.
I realize that charities are a dime a dozen and each one is more worthy than the next. But in asking you to consider this request (and consider it generously) all I can say is that as I write this, my 70-year old mother and her five, similarly aged siblings are personally engaged in spreading relief one bag of rice and ‘dal’ at a time. I will assure you that not a single penny will be spent on ‘overhead’ and that every dime spent will be under my personal scrutiny if not supervision. And in order to put my money where my convictions lie I will personally commit to funding $100,000 or 10% of what I am seeking to raise. In case you might be wondering, $100,000 represents a not insignificant amount of my net-worth. But no worthy cause is without costs and this is a debt-of-honor for me.
This is a labor of love for me -- a debt that I seek to make a partial payment on. The images that I cannot shake off are not those of water, water as far as the eyes can see, nor of bodies and carcasses flowing rapidly by. They are of children rendered mute by suffering and more suffering. We have to give them hope and a lifeline so that we do not leave a legacy of a completely insane world for our children. I used to think that it is not for us to try and save the world. But those images, juxtaposed in my mind with images of my own children, are forcing me to rethink things.
Muhit Rahman