Cyclone Sidr barreled through Bangladesh last week and left more than 3,000 people dead and 95 percent of the affected area’s rice crops destroyed—the second natural disaster to hit the Muslim nation this year, reported Gospel for Asia (GFA), a ministry dedicated to church-planting in Asia.
GFA immediately deployed 125 missionaries and volunteers to distribute food, blankets and other emergency supplies.
“These are poor, simple people who live in homes they make themselves out of mud and wood,” said GFA President K.P. Yohannan. “There is no way those homes could withstand the strength of this storm. Now they are eating grass to survive and crying out for milk for their babies, so we are doing everything we can to help them.”
GFA is calling on Christians worldwide to pray for those people who are hungry, displaced, injured and grieving in the wake of last week’s storm, one of the worst to hit the South Asian country in 30 years.
Many of the nation’s 130 million people have lost their main source of food due to the destruction of the rice crops. At least 500,000 homes were reportedly destroyed.
The GFA Web site (www.gfa.org) requested that Christians around the world pray for their group’s ministry workers to “be able to minister effectively to those who lost family members, homes and their means of livelihood in the storm.”
