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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2024
Based on a life story interview with Raymond Brian, aka Mother Nature (15 September 2019)
I am in Nairobi, Kenya and I’m a refugee right now. I work with The Nature Network: that’s a group of LGBTI Ugandan refugees and asylum seekers, who are talented in different arts. I am transgender, I am gay. I keep myself as a gay man but I feel like a transgender person. Just because of where we are right now, I can’t express all my feelings to the wider community. The community where we are right now is not ok with transgender persons yet. I would love to be there as a transgender person.
I am one of the founders of The Nature Network. It started when we were just mimicking TV presenters, radio presenters. We have a WhatsApp group where we do audio-radio presentations, we do vlogs, we post them on Facebook and our YouTube channel, on Twitter and Instagram. So, through these, we pass on information about our life as LGBTI people, so that people get to know who we are and what we go through, and that we are not so different from other people.
Here in Matasia, we have a number of people in the house. We are currently sixteen and we all contribute. Everyone contributes a certain amount, so that we can pay the rent, utility bills, so we can buy food as a family, because we take ourselves as a family. We are fellow refugees, mostly Ugandans, though we are not limited by nationalities but by who can go by our rules as The Nature Network.
We used to get some funding from different funders: we got a grant from International AIDS Alliance, which changed its name to Frontline AIDS now. It used to support us, because we had people living with HIV with us. We are still having them in our house but, you know, funds are always limited to three months or four months. Still, we are having some income-generating activities. We used to have poultry, do photography and videography, whereby we get hired on some occasions, mostly from the gay-friendly communities here in Kenya, and some churches. We actually had an opportunity to get a contract from Global Platform Kenya (Action Aid Kenya): it was about documenting a project of an alliance between religious leaders and LGBTI activists.
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