Three nearly malnourished gay prisoners last week received a delivery of a month’s worth of food at Cameroon’s Yaoundé Central Prison, thanks to generous readers of the Erasing 76 Crimes blog.
The Not Alone / Pas Seul campaign provides food for 3 emaciated prisoners in Cameroon whose only crime is being gay. Further support is needed.
A second delivery of food is scheduled for the end of this month if readers again donate necessary funds. (To pitch in, click the “Donate” button on the Facebook page of the St. Paul’s Foundation or the “Donate” button on that blog’s home page, which links to PayPal.)
Last week’s food was donated through the Not Alone / Pas Seul project sponsored by the blog and the St. Paul’s Foundation for International Reconciliation. Because Yaoundé prisoners receive only one meal a day, the prisoners there are emaciated and often sick.
Food at Camfaids headquarters before its delivery on Aug. 7 to gay prisoners at Yaoundé Central Prison in Cameroon. Photos are not allowed in the prison. (Photo courtesy of Steeves WInner)
The delivery included two portable cooking stoves, rice, tapioca, bouillon cubes, pasta, onions, tomatoes, cocoyams (savons macabo), cooking oil, salt, sugar, bleach, face cloths, antibiotic soap and toilet paper.
Details of the prisoners’ condition, their responses to the food, and their thoughts about the future — all that information is reserved for the readers who donated money to the project. You can be in the know also, if you donate.
Money for the food was collected in an online fund drive on Ulele.com in July. The money was then transferred to Cameroon and presented to the LGBT advocacy group Camfaids (Cameroonian Foundation for AIDS), which purchased the food and delivered it to the prisoners on Tuesday, Aug. 7. Copies of receipts and details of those transactions were compiled in an email to the project’s donors. That email is available on request. (Ask for “Not Alone receipts, Aug. 7, 2018” in an email to [email protected].)
Steeves Winner, the blog’s reporter, and Brice Evina, a member of the Not Alone / Pas Seul project advisory committee, visited the prison on Aug. 8 to meet with the prisoners and to verify that the delivery was successful.
The LGBT advocacy group Humanity First Cameroon is scheduled to make the next delivery.
Unless police and courts in Yaoundé resume their past practice of imprisoning gay men simply for being gay, that prison will no longer house any victims of Cameroon’s homophobic anti-homosexuality law, Section 347-bis, after late September, when the three men are scheduled to be freed. (Yay!)
For more information about each of the three prisoners, read these past articles:
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