Cyclone Aila caused hundreds of deaths, agricultural damage to rice crops, raised river levels and broke through mud embankments. There were countless victims who were, and still are, in need of help.

In June 2009, 1° Initiative began to collect aid. We sent out messages to everyone we knew and requested them to donate aid materials like clothes, dry food, money, saline, medicines, etc and drop them off at several pick-up/drop-off points across the city. In collaboration with CommunityAction, we also set up donation boxes at different schools and centres across Dhaka, where students were encouraged to make small contributions.The plan was to use the donated money for long term rehabilitation of Aila victims, such as setting up tubewells on high-raised ground for access to clean drinking water and building new homes. The team was glad to receive a huge response in terms of donations in the form of both money and relief materials.

After a grueling two months of work, a team from One Degree Initiative finally managed to re-open the library in Pogose School in Puran Dhaka - the first private school in Dhaka founded in 1848!

When we first visited the library we had not anticipated what we would find there. We were drowned in dust and it felt like trying to wake up a sleeping giant. Everyday we would clean and list and come home looking like chimney-sweeps. We sorted the books into disposable and usable books, disposed of the text books which were out of syllabus, cleaned the books and rearranged them in the shelves after the catalogueing was complete. This is the fourth library that 1di set up but is the first one which they reopened after re-cataloguing all the books. Dusting wasn't the only thing we did there. Apart from playing in the dust, we sucessfully broke a bench, made a huge mess and irritated the teachers in many different ways however they were awefully kind about it all.