The College Fix

It began with a simple Facebook event.

Little did Umar Agha, CC ’11, know that he would ultimately raise over $150,000 and 100 tons of food for rural victims of the floods that ravaged Pakistan this summer.

Two months ago, Agha, who checks his Facebook perhaps once a week, was interning for the Rural Support Programmes Network—a Pakistani non-governmental organization—and learning about how people who had been internally displaced by the war on terror were resettling into their former communities.

“After I heard the floods had destroyed a village I had visited [earlier in the summer], I started to picture how all of the smiling kids I had met, so glad to be home after all of those years as IDPs [internally displaced persons], had died or been displaced all over again,” Agha said.

His conscience, he said, would not allow him to ignore their plight.

Agha created a Facebook event—the first he ever made—inviting friends and family to participate in a donation drive for RSPN, before many Pakistanis even understood the magnitude of the damage.

Over three days, activity on the event’s wall increased dramatically. By the third day, hundreds of people were exchanging information and inquiring about ways to help, he said.

Though Agha still won’t accept his mother’s friend request, she wrote on the event’s wall to ask where to make out checks. Strangers wanted to know where to send mattresses and bags of rice.

Read the full story at the Columbia Spectator.

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