Stories – from other sites

Anonymous: From the Netherlands about Ethiopia

Posted on March 7, 2010. Filed under: Stories - from other sites |

The other face of Ethiopia

Like other oppressive homophobic governments & society homosexuality remains illegal & totally taboo in Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s government took a strong move to ban same-sex relationship even between consensual same sex adult in the criminal & penal code of the country chapter 600/601 from 5-10 years hard imprisonment. Any acts of showing this behavior will end in imprisonment with sever corporal punishment & torture. This in turn violate Ethiopia’s own Constitution and the analogous provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (i.e. articles 2, 3, 11, and 28) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) (i.e. articles 2, 18, 19, 21, 22, and 26).The legislators called homosexuality an affront to Christianity and Islam. Since, this sexual orientation does not conform to the legendary tale & primitive ideology of ultraconservative society; gays & lesbians of Ethiopia prefer to live hidden behind the curtains with lack of confidence & constant fear. Ethiopia has an ever growing gay & lesbian’s population from time to time; the society thinks homosexuality as a western influence (foreign import) & inexcusable sin.

Therefore, gays & lesbians of Ethiopia are suffering a lot from the government’s hostility. Stigma, violence, discrimination, hatred, disrespect, intimidation, abuse, harassment, negative attitude, economic deprivation social injustice, kangaroo court trial, extra-judicial killing & even worse murder. The refusal of the Ethiopian governments to address violence committed against LGBT people creates a culture of impunity where such abuses can continue and escalate unmitigated. Often, such abuses are committed by the state authorities themselves, with legal sanction. Human rights abuses based on sexual orientation in Ethiopia violates the fundamental tenets of international human rights law which is signed & ratified by the Ethiopian government; the infliction of torture and cruel inhuman and degrading treatment (Article 5); arbitrary detention on grounds of identity or beliefs (Article 9); the restriction of freedom of association (Article 20) and the denial of the basic rights of due process of law. The Ethiopian government has an obligation to promote and protect the human rights of its population without distinction of any kind, including sexual orientation or gender identity. As a member of the UN Human Rights Council, Ethiopia is required to uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights of all people regardless of their sexual orientation.

In Ethiopia, if some one is discovered or even suspected to be gay, no one will shake his hand; they want you to be burned in the ever-lasting flame. Many gays & lesbians of Ethiopia have committed suicide & flee out of their country in response to this & they still fear for their lives back in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian gays, lesbians, bisexual & transgender community based human right organization is established in 2007 on the aim of engaging in the areas of advocacy, relief & development for the sexual minorities of Ethiopian & Ethiopian origin, demanding & safeguarding sexual freedom in Ethiopia.We are working hard & tirelessly for the acknowledgment by the Ethiopian government & the international human rights community but the reaction of the Ethiopian government was discouraging & they told us to emigrate only for our difference in sexual orientation. As a steering committee of organization we are responsible for generating a peaceful storm of publicity about Ethiopian gays, lesbians, bisexual & Trans gender peoples sexual freedom all over Ethiopia but no way to accomplish this because the government is putting obstacles not to give press conference, no gay summit pride parade; we are surrounded by the government security forces in every step we make. We face on our day to day life a massive arrest, corporal punishment,detention,torture,forced disappearances, structural economic deprivation,inhman/degrading punishment, extra judicial killings,& other forms of government sponsored human right abuses on Ethiopian sexual community members who live in Addis especially on selectively targeted HR activists. Particularly these form of HR abuse are practiced commonly by the law enforcement officers & if the abuse is in prison it is also assisted by other inmate prisoners. We will send you if you need extra detailed information we can send you the state very inhuman & rampant human right abuse report.

We strongly believe that we don’t have to get a majority of the population on our side to enjoy our basic human rights; a civil right does not depend on a majority approval to be exercised. Recently, we have started some grass root activities for the acknowledgment, understanding, & legalization of sexual freedom of gay & lesbians in Ethiopia. ESMCBO urgently need the helping hand of all International human right actors to work with us in partnership/collaboration of any means to achieve the planned projects of Ethiopian LGBT community to bring the desired human right & social justice for those who are victimized, traumatized, oppressed & stigmatized. We are also lobbying UN higher commission on human right & UN Human Rights Council to influence the Ethiopian government to abide by the Article 16, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which stipulates;
     1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
     2. Ensure that all allegations and reports of human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity are promptly and impartially investigated and perpetrators held accountable and brought to justice;
     3 Take all necessary legislative, administrative and other measures to prohibit and eliminate prejudicial treatment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity at every stage of the administration of justice;
     4. Ensure adequate protection of human rights defenders at risk because of their work on human rights and sexual orientation and gender identity. We urgently need the recognition & assistance of all international human right actors to change the current unacceptable & oppressive situation in Ethiopia.
email them: esma2007@activist.com
Visit their web: www.esma2007.webs.com

This story is listed at: http://ilga.org/ilga/en/countries/WORLD/Your%20Stories

SB (anonymous) – Asylum from Uganda to UK

Posted on February 25, 2010. Filed under: Stories - from other sites |

Ugandan lesbian wins UK asylum court case, will government still try to deport?
By Paul Canning

A Ugandan lesbian, known at this stage only as ‘SB’, has won an asylum court case in the High Court against Home Office arguments that she could safely be deported.

The 24 February case before Mr Justice Hickinbottom, which will now go to judicial review, featured strong evidence of the persecution of lesbians in Uganda. The government’s defence highlights how the UK asylum system will make every effort including breaking and twisting both rules and evidence to deport lesbians and gays.

It remains to be seen whether the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, will continue to insist that it is safe to return her to Uganda.

Fleeing from Uganda
SB had been briefly detained by police for her lesbianism in September 2003 in Mukono, just west of Kampala (which has ties to Guildford), and again in Kampala in May 2004. Released, she was put on bail but because she had not complied with their reporting conditions she was put on a ‘wanted list’.

That November she traveled on a visitor visa to the UK. She overstayed the visa and was discovered during an immigration sweep. Found to have a false Ugandan passport she was arrested and sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment.

Many LGBT asylum seekers do not immediately claim asylum for a variety of reasons, including shame or simply a lack of awareness that they can claim asylum. False papers are often used to escape oppression but lead to criminal charges.

In June 2008, SB claimed asylum. This was refused point blank by the Home Office: they did not believe either that she was a lesbian or that she had been detained by police.

She appealed before an immigration judge in March 2009 but asylum was again refused on the basis that “there was no evidence that she was at risk of ill-treatment of such severity [once deported] as to amount to persecution.”

That judge agreed with the Home Office’s case that there was only ever one case of persecution of lesbians in Uganda, which had involved the high profile chair of a gay group. Because, the judge said, SB was “a very discreet person, and had conducted her sexual relationships discreetly in the past – and would continue to” she could be safely deported.

However the judge did accept the fact that she was a lesbian, that she had been detained by the police and ran the risk of being detained again.

She filed another appeal in July 2009 but on 2 November a caseworker issued an order to seize, detain and then deport her.

On 5 November further representations were made which included far more detailed and up-to-date evidence on the position of lesbians and gays in Uganda. But these were again rejected out of hand by the Home Office who plowed on with their drive for deportation.

Justice Hickinbottom described this decision as “irrational”.

The evidence
The evidence Hickinbottom had before him came from Dr Michael Jennings of The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Paul Dillane from Amnesty International UK, who works with the AI Office in Kampala, and Dr Chris Dolan, Director of the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, a community project of the Faculty of Law, Makere University.

Dolan provided over 350 pages of recent background material, including work on the treatment of returnees, particularly at (Kampala’s) Entebbe Airport.

This showed that there is a check on failed asylum seeker returnees by Ugandan police and that, given the current hostile attitude towards homosexuality, it would be more difficult for SB to bribe her way out of detention (as John Bosco, who was returned by the Home Office, was forced to do), and it’s likely that any bribe would be for a considerable sum.

Amnesty International said that her history of arrest and detention would mean she would be “at real risk of harm should she be forcibly returned.” Evidence presented of the abuse suffered by lesbians in Ugandan police detention ran the gamut from touching of intimate parts to the threat of being put into a male cell with the consequent risk of rape.

Prossy Kazzoza, who finally won UK asylum in 2008, was marched naked to a Ugandan police station and subjected to horrific sexual attacks and physical torture after she was discovered by her family. She escaped to the UK after her family bribed the guards to release her — as they wanted to deal with their family shame by having Prossy killed.

The original immigration judge for Prossy’s case believed her claim to having been raped and tortured but felt it would be safe to return her to a different part of Uganda.

The evidence Hickinbottom had showed that identified gay men and lesbians can be the subject of ill-treatment, by both the public in terms of lynching and ‘corrective rape’ and by the police — without them being otherwise ‘high profile’. (Thus arguing against the Home Office claims that only one lesbian who was a group leader has ever been persecuted in Uganda).

Because SB is unmarried and without children, the evidence showed, it would – apart from the police attentions – be extremely difficult for her to maintain the sort of ‘discretion’ which Home Office policy dictates should allow for ‘safe’ deportation for lesbians and gays even to countries where persecution is known to occur (for example Iran).

Wrote Hickinbottom:
Given this evidence – much of which post-dates the determination of Immigration Judge Grimmett last year – it is perhaps surprising that the Secretary of State took the view that this material, taken with the material the Claimant previously relied upon, was not such as to give the Claimant any chance at all of succeeding with her new asylum claim before a tribunal.

Never mind the evidence
All of this was blithely dismissed by the Home Office representative who wanted deportation because he continued to claim that evidence “lacked specific examples of ill-treatment of identified gay men and lesbians in Uganda”. Home Office minister Alan Johnston’s representative claimed:
• that the ill-treatment of gay men in Uganda was limited to discriminatory legislation that was not enforced
• SB would only be at risk of arrest in Kampala because the record of her bail infringement was only kept there (evidence showed otherwise, Ugandan police do share the ‘wanted list’)
• she could internally relocate and live discreetly, as a lesbian, without fear of persecution
• even if arrested in Kampala, she would not face the risk of persecution because the harassment she suffered at the hands of the police when she was arrested in 2003 and 2004 was not sufficiently severe to amount to persecution
• there was evidence of only one incident in which lesbians had suffered ill-treatment during detention
All this is in line with the Home Office country-specific operational guidance notes available to case workers and judges on Uganda – it makes no mention of lesbians. (A series of reports – including one last month – have decried the quality of these reports.)

Victory?

Refusing the Home Office and allowing the judicial review, Hickinbottom wryly noted that the presentation of the previous judgment once again by Alan Johnston’s representative as an argument for deportation – despite all the subsequently available evidence of persecution of lesbians in Uganda – could not be used as “a trump card for the Secretary of State”.

He also decided that the brief detention of SB on the orders of a case worker in November was unlawful. He said a number of mistakes were made by the case worker, such as falsely claiming that SB was liable to abscond, and that an Judge’s order saying she could not be deported due to a judicial review and must be released was ignored.

It is not over for SB. The Home Office could still fight the case at its next stage. It can keep trying to pull out trump cards rather than live up to its solemn obligations under international laws which the UK is signed up to.

Other parts of the British government are engaged with critiquing the same ‘crack down’ on Ugandan lesbians and gays that’s detailed in evidence presented in SB’s case. Ministers have made statements. The Foreign Office is “concerned”. The Prime Minister has pulled aside the Ugandan president and told him to stop.

Perhaps those ministers who tell off Uganda for its attitude to Ugandan lesbians could have a quiet word with their fellow minister, Alan Johnson, about his own treatment of Ugandan lesbians?

This story is located at:
http://madikazemi.blogspot.com/2010/02/ugandan-lesbian-wins-uk-asylum-court.html

Mehdi Kazemi – Asylum from Iran to Europe

Posted on February 20, 2010. Filed under: Stories - from other sites |

Gay Iranian Fights For Asylum In Europe – 19-Year-Old Man’s Plea Initially Rejected By U.K., Says Boyfriend Executed In Iran

(AP) The Netherlands’ highest court rejected a gay Iranian asylum seeker’s last-ditch bid to avoid deportation to Britain, where he fears authorities will send him back to Tehran and possible execution.

In a ruling published on its Web site Tuesday, the Council of State said Britain is responsible for Mehdi Kazemi’s case, because it was there that the 19-year-old first applied for asylum.

Gay rights campaigner Rene van Soeren said Kazemi’s Dutch lawyer was considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The lawyer, Borg Palm, did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Boris van der Ham, a lawmaker who has taken up Kazemi’s cause, has tabled questions in Parliament asking the junior minister for immigration, Nebahat Albayrak, to lobby British authorities on Kazemi’s behalf.

Albayrak should either urge Britain not to send Kazemi back to Iran or offer him asylum in the Netherlands, Van der Ham said in a telephone interview.

“There should be some political leadership,” he said. “I hope in Britain they will do it and otherwise we should take the boy.”

Kazemi is not expected to be deported before Albayrak has answered Van der Ham’s questions.

Justice Ministry spokeswoman Karen Temmink said Albayrak is studying the court ruling and drawing up answers to Van der Ham’s questions.

Kazemi’s case highlights not only the plight of homosexuals in Iran, but also differences in the way European Union allies deal with asylum seekers.

The Netherlands relaxes its tough asylum laws for Iranian gays – virtually guaranteeing asylum to any who apply here – because of persecution they face at home. Britain, on the other hand, rejected Kazemi’s original asylum request.

Kazemi, 19, says he traveled to London to study English in 2005 and applied for asylum in Britain after learning that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy.

After British authorities rejected Kazemi’s application, he fled to mainland Europe and applied for asylum in the Netherlands.

Quote
We examine with great care each individual case before removal and we will not remove anyone who we believe is at risk on their return.

U.K. Border and Immigration Agency However, because Kazemi had already applied for asylum and been rejected in Britain, the Dutch government is refusing to consider his case and insists he must be sent back to Britain. It cites the European Union’s 2003 Dublin Regulation, which declares that the member state where an asylum seeker first enters the EU is responsible for processing that person’s claim.

Tuesday’s court ruling upheld the Dutch position.

Palm said last week that Kazemi was in such despair he was on suicide watch in a center for rejected asylum seekers in the port city of Rotterdam.

Britain’s Home Office has declined comment, saying it does not discuss individual asylum applications, but it is unlikely authorities would reverse their earlier rejection.

However, Britain’s Border and Immigration Agency has issued a statement that could give Kazemi hope.

“We examine with great care each individual case before removal and we will not remove anyone who we believe is at risk on their return,” the agency said.

Matteo Pegoraro, president of the Italian-based gay rights group EveryOne, which is lobbying for Kazemi, has said he knows of 10 gay people executed in Iran since 2005, based on reports from nongovernment groups and activists.

This story is located at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/12/world/main3927899.shtml

Ali and Mohammad – Asylum from Iran to Canada

Posted on February 20, 2010. Filed under: Stories - from other sites |

Ali, 32, and Mohammad, 25

Iranian gay couple granted asylum in Canada – A gay couple who fled Iran in 2005 to escape arrest and a possible death sentence for homosexuality have been given asylum in Canada.
The men, Ali, 32, and Mohammad, 25, arrived in Toronto Wednesday night. Their family names are being withheld to protect family members still in Iran.
The Islamic state routinely rounds up gays. A number have been placed on trial and sentenced to death according to international human rights groups although the government officially has said the executions were for other offences.
In 2005 Ali and Mohammad fled Iran for India where they sought and obtained help from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to relocate in Canada the Toronto Sun reported Thursday.
UNHCR made an “urgent and high priority” plea for their resettlement at the Canadian embassy in New Delhi, Arsham Parsi, of Iranian Queer Railroad, told The Sun.
The organization is modeled after the Underground Railroad that helped slaves from the US South escape to Canada in the mid 19th Century. Iranian Queer Road says it has helped more than 60 gay Iranian refugees resettle in Canada, the U.S. and Australia.
“There are many more Iranian queer refugees who are still being processed,” Parsi told The Sun.
Ali and Mohammad were staying with friends in Toronto on Thursday.
“It took them three years to get here,” said Parsi. “Canada is a gay-friendly country and they will be successful here.”

This story is located at:
http://www.365gay.com/news/iranian-gay-couple-granted-asylum-in-canada/

Fabiola Lemos – Asylum from Brazil, to US

Posted on February 16, 2010. Filed under: Stories - from other sites |

Many flee harassment at home for more accepting communities in the United States
By Diana Britton

One day Fabiola Lemos was walking out of a bakery in Mariana, the oldest city in Brazil’s Minas Gerais region, when she heard a guy say: “Here goes the dyke again. She thinks she can just walk up and down.”

Lemos felt a punch in the back, then was thrown to the ground and beaten. She remembers covering her face and praying, “I don’t want to die like this.”

A petite, muscular woman with curly black hair, Lemos, now 33, moved to Rio de Janeiro, hoping to find safety from persecution. But one day, heading for the supermarket, she heard guys making jokes about her, and calling her a man.

“I totally panicked. I ran like crazy,” she said. She found a policeman.
“Lucky you, they didn’t beat you up,” the officer sneered. “That’s what you deserve. Keep going, otherwise I may decide to do [to you] what they didn’t do.”

Lemos, a dental assistant, eventually moved to New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, where she lives with her mother. She’s one of many immigrants seeking asylum in the United States on fairly new grounds: persecution due to her sexual orientation. Then-U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno 13 years ago established that this was grounds for asylum in the United States. Now such asylum applications are growing.

There are no official stats on gay refugees: the U.S. government still classifies them simply as persecution cases. “Sexual orientation is not grounds for asylum,” said Shawn Saucier, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services, which oversees immigration cases under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. Since sexual orientation is not a separate legal category, the agency evaluates each person’s claim based on the facts at hand, Saucier said. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission has recorded 785 successful U.S. claims since 1994. But Dusty Aráujo, documentation program coordinator for the group’s San Francisco office, said that tally is probably incomplete.

Gay asylees are nonetheless a new and emerging community.

“Sexual orientation is the next big issue in terms of ‘will the whole world agree on that’?” said Nikki Dryden, staff attorney at Immigration Equality, a New York-based organization working to improve immigration rights for gay, bisexual, transgender and HIV-positive people. The United Nations is just starting to grapple with the issue, Dryden said.

The number of gay asylees skyrocketed in the 1990s, said Andrés Duque, who directs the Latino Commission on AIDS’ program Mano a Mano, in New York.

“When the first group of people started getting granted asylum, a lot of immigrants thought that it was really easy, so a lot of people started applying en masse,” Duque said.

Weihaur Lau, 28, an HIV prevention educator in San Francisco, was granted asylum in 2003 after coming to the U.S. from Malaysia in 1997 to study. A gay Malaysian politician had been persecuted in 1998, and since his case had been prominently featured in the news, many Malaysians were granted asylum around that time, Lau said.

It’s harder to win a case today. And when Congress passed the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which required individuals to file for asylum within one year of arriving in the United States, the number of gay asylees dwindled: often immigrants missed the deadline, advocates said.

Lemos almost did, too — but managed to file in April 2006, days before her year was up.
Saucier said his agency doesn’t consider the deadline a problem. “As soon as you land in the U.S., it’s reasonable to expect that you would make an asylum claim,” he said.

But gay immigrants often find it excruciating to testify about their sexual experiences in courtrooms before strangers. Lau, who grew up in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, is from a conservative Chinese background where, he said, homosexuality was not discussed.
“They don’t know how to talk about it,” he said. “They just have no concept of it.”

Asylees also suffer the extra stress of being obliged to wait much longer for green cards than immigrants who apply for work reasons. Lau said asylees must wait in line for as long as five to eight years, and cannot leave the country without forfeiting their status. So Lau could not return to Malaysia when his father died in May 2006.

“It was just a very huge regret in my heart that I couldn’t go back,” he said. “We feel imprisoned here too.”

Jesús Moreno, 28, fled Mexico City after the police demanded bribes in exchange for not telling his parents he was gay. Moreno, now an HIV testing coordinator in Oakland, Calif., said he endured an exhausting two hours of close questioning by an asylum officer about his persecution in Mexico. “Those are things that really hurt,” he said. “It was difficult to bring them to the present because you want to forget almost everything.”

But he was granted asylum, in June 2000. He now feels safe to walk the streets as an openly gay man. Even if he were harassed, he feels reassured that he could go to the police for help.
“That is the peace of mind that I have now,” he said.

Lemos has traveled between New York and Brazil for 10 years. But in Brazil, she still feels she must hide who she is – while in New York she is open about her sexual orientation. “For the first time, I really see a gay community,” she said. “Gay people walking, holding hands, all over. I was like, ‘This is amazing.’”

Fabiola Lemos was harassed in two Brazilian cities before petitioning for asylum in the United States, arguing she was persecuted because she is gay.

This story is located at:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/livewire/politics_society/gay_asylum/

Yousif Ali and Nawfal Muhamed – Asylum from Iraq to US

Posted on February 13, 2010. Filed under: Stories - from other sites |

After being kidnapped and raped in their home country, two gay Iraqis seek safety in Houston. But even in the land of the free, life isn’t easy
By David Taffet

Yousif Ali, 24, and Nawfal Muhamed, 20, are safe in Houston. But life is difficult.
The two have been denied food stamps. Jobs are not easy to find. The Sharpstown neighborhood where they live is dangerous. Neither man speaks English well. And the American relief agency that helps refugees has no services for gay men.

But all that aside, the two gay Iraqi refugees have asylum status and are safer here than they were in Iraq.

In Baghdad, Ali was kidnapped and raped. His boyfriend was murdered.
“Kidnapped many times,” Ali said. “I tried to escape. They put knife in my foot.”
He blamed the Mahdi Militia.

After escaping, he said, he called an Iraqi LGBT group in London. They told him to go to Syria and contact the United Nations. He made it to Syria by bus.
He said there are checkpoints every mile of the trip.

“If they think you are gay, they tell you ‘Go out from the car.’ Take them to unknown place and disappear,” Ali said.

He said that life in Iraq is difficult for everyone because of the war. But for those who are gay, life is intolerable.

Living on savings in Syria, Ali rented a room. He met Muhamed, who had escaped to Damascus when he was 16. He also wanted to move to the west, but was afraid to go to the U.N. office to request refugee status. Although his life was in constant danger in Iraq, he was afraid of U.N. forces that he thought would abuse him if he told them he is gay.

Muhamed’s parents were dead. His brother and sister know he is gay but he is not close to them. He has a boyfriend who is still in Iraq. In Syria he had another boyfriend who is also still there, but he said that one is bisexual and felt safe.

Ali’s family does not know he’s gay. They think a bomb caused the wounds to his foot and that he came to the United States to receive medical treatment. They do not know about the kidnappings.

Ali was granted refugee status first and given asylum in the United States. About seven months ago, he was given a plane ticket through London to Houston. He said he is paying back the airline fare, $35 a month. Muhamed arrived a month later. In his application, Muhamed said he had a friend in Houston. He begged them to send him to Texas, but instead he was given a ticket to Nashville.

“Catholic Charities and U.N. separated us,” Mohamed said. He said that their refugee services only help families, not singles.

Bruce Knotts is the executive director of the Unitarian Universalist United Nations office. He said theirs is the only faith-based U.N. office with full-time staff advocating for LGBT rights. He is familiar with Ali and Muhamed’s case.

Once certified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, they were resettled, Knotts said. The United States has accepted those seeking asylum based on sexual orientation since a law passed during the Bush administration that was introduced by Rep. Barney Frank.

Knotts said that the United States takes in more refugees than all other countries combined, but that Canada does a better job taking in LGBT asylum-seekers.
Catholic Charities provides many of the services in this country for refugees and is funded through the federal government. Their Web site says they provide “Apartment rent and furnishings.” Ali said that their Iraqi neighbors in Houston got both. He was given a bare apartment. Knotts agrees that Catholic Charities offers families services and provides for basic needs that they have denied the gay men.

When Muhamed arrived in the United States, he was assigned a straight roommate in Nashville. So he contacted Ali and bought a bus ticket to Houston where the two were reunited.

Life in Houston has been difficult. Ali said that he was given food stamps when he first came to this country but then the food stamps were cut off and does not know why. He has reapplied.

The only job he has gotten was working in a warehouse two hours a day. The job was a long drive from his apartment, and it cost more to commute than he was being paid. He’s looking for full-time work.

Knotts explained that the food stamps were cut off when Ali got the part-time job. He said one of the things the men need is someone who can help walk them through the system and advise them about getting job training and full-time work.

Muhamed said he would like to find employment but he has never worked. “Only high school,” he said. Ali explained that Muhamed has never worked before. While in high school he was kidnapped and raped and fled to Syria where he lived for four years and was not allowed to work.

Their Houston neighborhood is dangerous. Sharpstown has a large Iraqi immigrant population. Knotts said the two men are still living among the same people who tormented them in Iraq. At the Creating Change conference in Dallas last weekend, Knotts said they connected the two men with a Unitarian church in Houston and the Houston GLBT Community Center.

Knotts said, “They need friends.”

He emphasized they are here legally and need help applying for their green cards because both are eligible to work. They need someone to help them access the language classes, vocational training and other services the federal government funds Catholic Charities to provide to refugees. And, he said, they need to move to a gay-friendly neighborhood.

This story is located at:
http://www.dallasvoice.com/artman/publish/article_12485.php