BAR HARBOR – Half a world away from this quiet community, more than a million victims of the Oct. 8 earthquake in Pakistan and India are threatened by lack of food, shelter and medical attention, and one local woman can’t rest easy without doing her part to help.

“It is catastrophic by any standard,” Bobbie-Lynn Hutchins, founder of new nonprofit group United World Citizens, said of the natural disaster. “There are more people in peril of losing their lives in the mountains now than in the 2004 tsunami.”

The earthquake killed more than 73,000 people in Pakistan and more than 1,000 people on the Indian side of divided Kashmir. The bone-chilling cold of the mountainous region is of grave concern to United Nations officials, who reported the first cold-related deaths at the end of November.

Aid workers are racing to get supplies to survivors in hard-to-reach areas, the U.N. Web site reported.

Hutchins’ group is sponsoring a raffle in an effort to raise at least $5,000 for Doctors Without Borders, an international medical humanitarian organization that is working to provide victims with tents, blankets, construction kits, medical aid and vaccinations.

Hutchins has been dismayed, she said, by what she sees as limited attention that has been paid to the earthquake victims and their dire need for assistance.

“There are millions of people who are alive and can stay alive if they get help,” she said. “This is a particularly desperate situation. What’s happening is winter’s coming on. They’re in the mountains with no shelter. It’s hard to get to them.”

A recent auction sponsored by her nonprofit group netted $4,000 for victims of Hurricane Katrina, and Hutchins hopes that the raffle will attract even more attention – and dollars.

“There’s still time to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths,” she said.

The raffle’s grand prize is an overnight stay at the Charles Hotel in downtown Bangor (formerly the Phenix Inn), dinner for two at the New Moon Cafe and nearly $500 in gift certificates to Bangor businesses. The second prize is an overnight stay at the Fairfield Inn in Bangor and dinner for two at the Olive Garden. The third prize is tickets for two to the Bangor Symphony Orchestra.

The prize drawing will be held Jan. 9 and all proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders.

Raffle tickets will be sold at Rue Cottage Books in Southwest Harbor, J&B Atlantic in Ellsworth and Salisbury Farms Hardware in the village of Town Hill in the town of Bar Harbor. Tickets also may be purchased by calling Hutchins at 288-9808.