WILMINGTON, Del. – The joy Sodiq Yusuff experienced in his UFC debut was cut with sorrow from losing a family member back in Nigeria.

Heading into his octagon follow-up, Yusuff (8-1 MMA, 1-0 UFC) never wants to experience that again. But he needs help to get his family out of his native country, and he plans to use the UFC’s platform to ask for help.

“After this fight, if they have a post-fight press conference, I’m going to try and get the word out if there’s anybody that can help me out to get my brother and sisters visas to come over here,” he told MMA Junkie in advance of a fight against Sheymon Moraes (11-2 MMA, 2-1 UFC) at UFC on ESPN 2, which takes place Saturday at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.

Yusuff lost his brother to typhoid fever one month prior to a first-round knockout win at UFC Fight Night 142. But his mother hid it from him until one week before the fight because she wanted him to focus on his fight.

Yusuff and another younger brother are the only children his birth mother took to America, according to ESPN.com. He is one of 16 children in his extended family, who came from a polygamist community in Nigeria.

The thing that still bothers Yusuff is the entirely preventable disease that took his brother. If his family was in the U.S., he said, that would have never happened. It’s one thing to send money back home, and another to take steps that could change their lives for the better.

Every day Yusuff gets updates from his family. The ones who have the internet are able to watch his fights. The ones who don’t, he said, get a live play-by-play on WhatsApp.

With the UFC’s expanding popularity, it might not be long before Yusuff is able to fight in his home country. He sees Africa as a place of great untapped potential, where the next Kamaru Usman or Francis Ngannou could be found. But he also fears for his family’s wellbeing.

“When I get that mic time, I’ll ask for help,” he said. “Maybe there’s someone out there that knows a way that I could get a visa, because everything we’ve been trying has been pretty hard to get everybody over here. The lines to get a visa are way too long; it’s probably going to be 10, 15 years before everybody can come over here. So maybe there’s a lawyer or something that knows what they’re doing and can help me out.”

To hear more from Yusuff, check out the video above.

For more on UFC on ESPN 2, visit the UFC Rumors section of the site.