By James Wandera Ouma | Executive Director
It is with our deepest gratitude that we say thank you to all of you who considered supporting our homeless LGBT youth. It was through your tireless efforts that you funded our Homeless Shelter for this winter. Because of your efforts we can provide hot meals, blankets, and personal items this winter.
Your support enables us to continue our work everyday! An amazing job and amazing results! You are an awesome community!
Usalama-Homeless Shelter currently serves 12 LGBT youth who were renounced and kicked out of their families just because of their sex orientation and gender identity.
Each year hundreds of LGBT youth wake up in a place they can’t call home. For some, their bed is in a shelter. For others, it’s in an abandoned car or on the street. We are now working hard to make sure homelessness does not have lasting effects on the physical and mental health of young LGBT in Tanzania for many years to come.
Homelessness among the young LGBT in Tanzania continue to be a traumatic experience because they lose everything. They lose their routines, privacy, family, friends, and future. They’re in situations where they don’t know where the next meal is going to come from, or where they’re going to be tomorrow.
As a result, these youth get involved is risk behaviour such as drinking, smoking using drugs and engaging in sex work or sex trade to survive which puts them at much higher risk for HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections,
Through your support, we are working hard to make sure these youth are off the streets, have a safe place to live, provide medical care, all other personal needs and fund them to go to school so that they can have a bright future.
There is an increase of parents who reject and kick out their LGBT children in Tanzania, and our goal is to serve as many youth as possible but at the moment we can only serve 12, please continue supporting Usalama-Shelter so that we can be able to accommodate 32 LGBT youth by the end of 2015.
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