You can help pay for proper funeral for slain LGBT activist

Colin Stewart is a 45-year journalism veteran living in Southern…

Eric Lembembe (Photo courtesy of Facebook)

Activists in Africa, Europe and the United States are joining force to raise money for the funeral of LGBT activist and journalist Eric Ohena Lembembe, who was murdered a week ago.

Lembembe came from a poor family in Yaoundé, Cameroon, who cannot afford the expenses of a large funeral. The funeral is tentatively scheduled for noon, Saturday, July 27.

His friends and colleagues hope to raise $5,200 (2,600,000 CFA francs; 4,000 euros; 3,400 pounds) to cover the costs of the coffin, hearse, grave site and grave maintenance, grave clothes and morgue expenses, plus rental of tent and chairs for mourners. The finances are being handled by Lembembe’s organization, the Cameroonian Foundation for AIDS (Camfaids), which works for health and rights of LGBT people.

Even before the fund request was launched, $315 was received from contributors in Kenya and France.

Contributors can choose among three methods for sending donations:

By wire transfer. Send the donation by MoneyGram or Western Union to Michel Louis Engama, the financial officer of Camfaids, in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Notify him by email of the transfer number and amount sent, so he can pick it up. Send the email to three addresses: camfaids@gmail.com, engamamichel@yahoo.fr and domston2004@yahoo.fr

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By bank transfer. To receive instructions on how to accomplish this, send an email to camfaids@gmail.com with a copy to domston2004@yahoo.fr . This email should be in French. (Translation into French by Google Translate would be adequate.)

By check, credit card (via telephone) or PayPal. Contributions to pay for the funeral will be accepted by the San Diego-based St. Paul’s Foundation for International Reconciliation, which will transfer the funds to Camfaids. On the Web page for these donations, designate them as contributions for Cameroon.