Blind Somali refugee treks 90 km to safety

DADAAB, Kenya (Reuters) - After her 90 km trek over dusty scrubland from Somalia to Kenya, Habiba Ali is still exhausted, sickly and trembling with emotion,Days before, the blind, 53-year-old mother had set off from Kismayu in Somalia, for the first time in her life, to be reunited with her sole surviving son in Dadaab, the world's biggest refugee settlement. Ali's husband Ibrahim and three other sons died in Somalia's never-ending cycles of violence. "We used to be a big, happy family, but look where life has brought us now," she said, crouched under a tree at a U.N. refugee registration unit in the Dagahaley section of Dadaab, a settlement of three refugee camps in northern Kenya. Encouraged by her son, she and her 8-year-old granddaughter left Kismayu -- a port held since mid-2008 by the militant Islamist militia al Shabaab -- on May 25. Ali paid $100 for a truck to take her from Kismayu to the border, where her son Hussein Barre, 21, came to meet her...more..http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/6/7/worldupdates/2009-06-06T211433Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-401308-1&sec=Worldupdates