Video: Return trip to Somali homeland leaves Rochester woman with haunting images
Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN
It is an image Udbi Wallin cannot forget.
An elderly blind woman sits alone under a makeshift shelter of twigs and cloth in a camp for refugees of the recent violence in Somalia. She has no food. Her only daughter has abandoned her — choosing to leave rather than watch her mother starve to death.
“The day I met her, she said she only had one cup of tea all day,” Wallin said. “I could not sleep after I saw that.”
Wallin has spent more than half her life away from her homeland of Somalia. But the 48-year-old Rochester resident decided to return this year to see for herself what impact renewed fighting is having on civilians. What she saw shocked her.
“I really saw a horrible situation. Fifty thousand families outside Mogadishu are living in the worst condition you could ever imagine,” she said. “Less than 20 miles from the city, they can see their homes, and they can’t go back.”
Somalia has been a country in chaos ever since civil war broke out in 1991. That fighting led many Somalis to leave, with a number of them settling in Minnesota. As of 2006, an estimated 3,049 people originally from sub-Saharan Africa — with the majority likely from Somalia — were living in Rochester, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Conditions had appeared to be calming until fighting broke out in 2006 between Islamic extremists and the interim government in the country’s capital, Mogadishu. In 2007, Ethiopian troops invaded the country to support the interim government.
Civilians have been caught in the crossfire, forcing 900,000 people to flee Mogadishu, according to the United Nations. The violence, coupled with drought conditions, rising food prices and a weak currency, means 2.6 million Somalis are in danger of starving.
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