Uganda: Community gardening helps queer Ugandans heal from trauma
LGBTQ+ activists in Kampala are using sustainable agriculture to survive crisis and social exclusion.
By Caleb Okereke
DW
Aug 26, 2021
Excerpt:
When the pandemic hit last year, Shawn Mugisha was sharing his two-bedroom apartment with nine other people. They were fellow members of Kampala’s embattled queer community whom he’d met through his work as a human rights activist and paralegal — people who had been ostracized from family, or had come out of police detention with nowhere to go.
For them, lockdown presented particular problems, Shawn says: “What does ‘stay at home’ actually mean for someone who has no home? What does stay at home mean for someone who’s doing sex work?”
Uganda first went into lockdown in April 2020, and food security quickly deteriorated. Supply chains collapsed, food prices soared and people began to go hungry. In cities like the capital Kampala, fresh produce and vegetables became particularly scarce.
Shawn, who is 34 and transgender, says that while many people in the city relied on family in rural areas to send supplies, those ostracized because of their sexual orientation or gender identity were often on their own.
