AN EAST Lancashire aid worker, who fled war-torn Kosovo just weeks before NATO air strikes began, returned to the area today in a bid to help thousands of refugees forced to flee their homes.

Kate Ogden, 37, of Castle Road, Colne, flew out to Albania this morning to join the huge international humanitarian aid projects set up to help those stranded on the border.

Kate, a nutritionist with the Action Against Hunger charity, only returned home in February after spending three months in the Kosovo capital Pristina.

Thousands of ethnic Albanians have since left the city, which has been described as a 'ghost town.'

Kate said: "When you have been somewhere and made friends with people and their families it is very difficult to sit here and see their plight on the TV, so I am going out there for a little while. When I was in Kosovo local people were employed by the charity and were for the most part our guides there. You do get attached to them and I hate to think they are suffering somewhere when I could do something to help. "I saw how people were suffering while I was there. People had their homes destroyed and had to run into the forests and mountains and survive in terrible conditions for two or three days before it was safe to return."

Although Kate does not know exactly what she will find when she gets to Albania, she's no stranger to dangerous and demanding conditions, after spending time in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Chechenya at the height of civil war.

While in Kosovo, she helped run programmes distributing emergency food to people living rough in the mountains because they had been forced from their homes, as well as distributed seeds and tools to farmers.

She said: "When I get there one of the first things we usually do is a nutrition survey to see what exactly is needed, as well as looking at project to provide safe drinking water and sanitation for these people."

Action Against Hunger has now launched a Kosovo Crisis Appeal which requires urgent funds.

It is estimated that more than 170,000 ethnic Albanians have been forced from the country in the last couple of days alone and many are living in fields close to Kosovo's borders with Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.

In the last two days, thousands more have been escorted from their homes at gunpoint by Serbian soldiers and crammed into freights trains with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

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