Students help organize Lebanese relief efforts

While completing summer engineering internships at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, six students from the American University of Beirut (AUB) are organizing relief efforts they hope will aid some 750,000 Lebanese civilians displaced as a result of recent bombings.

“For us, being outside Lebanon is a daily torture,” says Samer Sobh, a computer and communications engineering student from Alley, Mount Lebanon. “We are away from our parents and friends. We are living at the rhythm of the news.”

After the conflict began more than two weeks ago, the Lebanese students here were depressed, says Sobh. “But then we woke up,” he says. “This is not the way to help; this is not the solution to the never-solved problem. Lebanon needs us, and the Lebanese have nobody except us. This is why we have decided to replace passive grief with constructive action.”

Sobh says they are determined to “transform those feelings into actions” through a relief effort. Recently, the six students established an Internet forum with AUB students in Michigan and Sweden to focus humanitarian relief efforts for Lebanese civilians. In addition, the group hopes to centralize worldwide relief efforts – more than 100 Web sites and 200 bank accounts already exist – to avoid duplicating work.

Locally, the American Red Cross Badger Chapter is helping the students raise funds; a Madison mosque and several churches also are organizing a fund-raiser for Sunday, July 30.

“Our efforts should at least provide food, mattresses and medication to the refugees in need,” says Sobh. “Later on, donations to support the reconstruction of the Lebanese infrastructures will be needed too.”