LGBTI Ugandans prepare for Pride in refugee camp

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

LGBTI Ugandan refugees in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp are preparing to celebrate Pride on June 16, thanks to $1,500 worth of financial help from individual donors abroad and in Kenya.

Photo accompanying the GoFundMe appeal for contributions to Pride at Kakuma Camp.

Mbazira Moses, executive director of the LGBTI support group Refugee Flag Kakuma, wrote on Sunday that preparations are well under way, though further financial assistance is needed:

We are left with only 5 days to the event in Kakuma. All the programs on board are well set.

Thanks for your support, our beloved community of well-wishers and friends both national and international. Thanks for standing with us in all hard situations in Kakuma refugee camp. We are humbled!!

Some staff in the budget of the event are covered, some are still pending, and we call on your assistance to help and cover up the outstanding bills that are not yet covered.

We have been moving around to pin up the posters on different notice boards in trading centers around Kakuma.

Thorn bushes are needed to keep homophobic intruders from disrupting Kakuma Camp Pride. (Photo courtesy of Mbazira Moses)

The compound hosting the reception of the event needs to be fenced with thorn bushes to avoid easy access by intruders and homophobic heterosexual refugees who may have their own intentions regardless of the prevailing physical tight security presence. We will be grateful for all your support.

On GoFundMe, this is now-fully-funded $1,500 online appeal for Kakuma Pride 2018:

LGBTIQ in Kakuma Refugee Camp, we wish to celebrate the first Pride Day this year since we left our home countries and seek asylum in Kenya, due to the Kill the Gays Bill which was approved by the president in 2014. [Editor’s note: That bill was harsh, but the Ugandan Parliament passed it only after the provision for the death penalty was removed. Uganda’s Constitutional Court overturned it on a technicality in August 2014.]

We are going to celebrate this first Pride event in our premises in the camp. We are sad that we won’t get a chance to celebrate it in public with other refugees because of their hostility towards our gender identity. [Their attitudes are] hate, homophobia, injustice, inequality, discrimination, and prejudice towards us.

Help and donate so that you give a chance to LGBTI refugee minorities in Kenya to as well feel proud like the rest who are proud and free.

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This event will forward a message to heterosexual refugees in the camp that LGBTI refugees are of no harm but rather are human beings like the rest of them.

It will as well bring unity to the LGBTI refugee community not to feel so abandoned and isolated.

This is the budget for Kakuma Pride in Kenyan shillings (Ksh) and U.S. dollars: