Ketifa ran out the back gate and fled by bus straight for Uganda's border with Kenya, believing nowhere in the country would be safe. At the border crossing at Malaba, she learned that to get to Nairobi, Kenya's large capital city, would be expensive, and to live there even more so. Ketifa recalled how, as a child, a Kenyan classmate of hers had mentioned that Kenya accepts people who are chased out of other countries, letting them live in large camps.
Along the side of the road, she spotted a food vendor; she lied and told him that she was on her way to visit a friend in one of these camps. Could he direct her? He asked if she was referring to Kakuma—a large refugee camp in northern Kenya that opened in to house refugees fleeing Sudan's civil war, and that has since become home to nearly , refugees fleeing all manner of strife. The man described how she could get to Kitale, a town in the northern Rift Valley.
From there, she could take a bus through Lodwar and on to Kakuma. Ketifa had no money, so the vendor offered her a job: To earn enough for a bus ticket, she could wash dishes for a few hours. Three days later, Ketifa arrived at Kakuma, a refugee of Uganda's violent homophobia. With the anti-gay fervor growing in Uganda, Ketifa wasn't the only one to leave the country.
They wished to register themselves as lesbian, gay, and transgender refugees.
- Related Videos.
- free gay black dating Jalhay Belgium.
- Online Dating Sites, Internet Dating Websites - yas.1812web.com.
- Picturing ‘The German Vice’ - The Gay & Lesbian Review.
- online dating.
- anyone rent gay male escort Chimay Belgium.
Most were in their late teens or 20s, and most were men. They came from all over Uganda—some were working class, others were university educated. The priest had been a secret adviser to the gay community since After local newspapers reported that two men had married each other in Kampala, he published an op-ed condemning the wave of homophobia erupting in Uganda. At the end of his article, he listed his phone number.
LGBT people started calling, and his home soon became a haven for Ugandan gays. In the wake of the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, the priest led some LGBT people hiding from their families and the police to shelter.
- all gay sites Saint Nicolas Belgium;
- The Brutal Consequences of Uganda's Infamous Anti-Gay Law.
- dating gay help Antwerpen Belgium.
- Mature poirn;
- Connect with beautiful men and women in your local area and from around the world;
- eros gay escort Tielt Belgium.
But when the funding for the hideout dried up, many, fearing for their safety, said they wanted to leave the country. The priest told them that he didn't think Kenya would be any better, but they felt that they had no other choice. When they arrived in Nairobi, he counseled them to go to the UN to seek help. As the senior resettlement officer, De Langhe had arrived in Kenya in to help find new homes for the luckiest among the country's , refugees.
Since she took the job, only a few thousand had been successfully resettled each year. It was a rate far lower than the rate of new arrivals. When the 23 Ugandans showed up outside her office that day, she brought them to a conference room to hear their stories. As they shared the terror they had experienced, De Langhe became worried about how safe the group would be in Kenya.
The homophobia extended to the refugee camps as well. While most of the other refugees in the country had successfully escaped the conditions that had upended their lives, these gay refugees were entering an environment that posed many of the same threats of violence. The majority of them were actually targeted by their own family, which I think makes it extra hard. In Kenya and across the globe, the UN routinely gives priority to asylum seekers who are extremely vulnerable and have immediate protection needs, such as unaccompanied minors and people with life-threatening diseases.
Given this precedent, there are many reasons to hastily register people who might face grave danger while awaiting asylum. With some guidance from the UN's Division for International Protection in Geneva, De Langhe and her colleagues decided that this group needed special protection. They moved to expedite their asylum claims—to get them through Kenya as fast as possible.
But fast-tracking some refugees comes at the expense of others. There are 24, people in Kakuma and 8, in Nairobi on the waiting list for an appointment to determine whether or not they even qualify for refugee status—a six-month backlog. And sitting around for your turn is just the first step in a process that normally takes several years. Most refugees wait months or even years for consultations, but De Lange and her staff began interviewing the 23 LGBT refugees within weeks.
If it is a difficult time to be a refugee seeking resettlement out of Kenya, it is a difficult time to be doing so anywhere. Last year, there were more than 60 million refugees across the world—more than at any time since the end of World War II. And even though requests for asylum are at an all-time high, the number of refugees who successfully resettle is in decline: Only 73, were resettled in , down from 98, the previous year. Despite the unique threats against LGBT refugees from Uganda, did they deserve a disproportionate number of these slots?
And how could they be protected while they waited? After the decision to expedite the refugees' claims, the UNHCR, in partnership with HIAS, placed some of them in apartments in a poor neighborhood of Nairobi, where they lived in small rooms and sometimes shared beds. The ability of refugees to remain in Nairobi depended on the traditionally lax enforcement of Kenyan law, which requires all refugees to live in either Kakuma or Dadaab, another large refugee camp in the north.
But the Ugandans arrived at a time when refugees in Kenya were in the crosshairs of the country's security forces. After al Shabaab terrorists sieged Nairobi's Westgate Mall and killed more than 60 people in September , the Kenyan government needed to at least appear to be taking steps to root out the group. Refugees became the easiest targets for the country's war on terror. In April , the police swept hundreds off the streets in the Somali quarter of Nairobi, temporarily detaining them in the Moi International Sports Center, a soccer stadium built in the late 80s for the AllAfrica Games.
Soon, the refugees were relocated to the camps. The UNHCR negotiated their release before they could be shipped out of the city, and with no other choice, placed them briefly in an upscale hotel. It wasn't long, though, before the police discovered them. The officers threatened to deport the whole group back to Uganda. Once again left with limited options, the UNHCR persuaded the cops to bus the refugees immediately to Kakuma, the refugee camp in northern Kenya Ketifa had fled to.
Kakuma sits in Kenya's Turkana region, not far from the border with South Sudan. It is a flat, sprawling city of , people from Sudan, Somalia, and other neighboring countries. The UN provides monthly food rations, access to public water taps, and rudimentary medical care. Kakuma is large.
Beschrijving
Hundreds of miles of semi-arid desert surround the camp. Twelve square miles of people live cramped together in single-story huts. It's an inhospitable place—next to nothing grows in the dry, hard ground, and temperatures regularly reach well into the s. Situated only a few hundred miles from the Equator, and with most of the area's trees long ago chopped down for firewood or to make charcoal, there's little escape from the sun. Most of Kakuma's inhabitants spend their days with nothing to do.
Aside from reselling food rations or charcoal for cooking, not much work exists. A gay refugee from Uganda poses for a portrait in the apartment he shared with his boyfriend in Nairobi. Six months earlier, seven men wielding machetes had broken into their home and nearly killed him.
When the 23 Ugandans who had been living in hiding in Nairobi arrived, they joined the small group. They had been given their own sleeping quarters in the camp's warehouse-like reception center, though all that separated them from the other refugees were some curtains and sheets hanging from the ceiling. Speaking with the others, Ketifa realized she might get out of the camp before long. The LGBT refugees became a close group and consequently a target for harassment. They would mostly keep to themselves, but brawls would often break out when they crossed paths with straight refugees during mealtimes.
One day, Ketifa saw job postings looking for teachers at a secondary school for children in the camp. She had never worked as a teacher, but having gone to secondary school and one of Uganda's top universities, she was more qualified than most. How would I defend my position? She hadn't planned to build a life in Kakuma, but she was slowly making one.
Picturing ‘The German Vice’
There are , refugees in the camp, and most will never be resettled. When I visited Kakuma last October, De Langhe, who was transferred from the camp to Nairobi in May, greeted me in an open-air room filled with old wooden benches. Every asylum seeker arriving at Kakuma in the past two decades had passed through that room.
De Langhe led me to a small office.
SCRUFF - Gay Dating & Chat in de App Store
Covering the walls, shelves held fat, three-ring binders. Inside, they contained the names from a census conducted to determine who, among the tens of thousands of people qualifying for food rations, actually still lived in the camp. Even the 1 percent who win a ticket to a new life will usually have to wait several years before they are authorized to leave. There's been an uninterrupted backlog of asylum seekers since the day the camp opened.
Preceding the backlog for resettlement is another backlog entirely: registering the camp's mass of immigrants as refugees. De Langhe has been tasked with triaging between the two lagging processes.
The Worlds Most Exclusive Dating Site For Beautiful People Only
From Monday through Friday, De Langhe works to keep the process moving as best she can. She volunteers her Saturdays to listen to different elders and ethnic group leaders. They complain about the harsh environment, about attacks from other refugees. They say the Kenyan police seem to do nothing about it. There are more than 20 nationalities and numerous ethnic factions living side by side in the camp. Every Saturday, De Langhe visits representatives from two of them.