By M. Syambra Moitozo

Hannington Mugisha knew he needed to leave Uganda when his father threatened to kill him for being gay, but hesitated. He wasn’t sure where to go or how to get there. Then one day, while doing chores in the yard, his father walked up behind him with a rope and dragged him to the giant acacia tree that stood in front of their home. Mugisha hung from the tree struggling to breathe while his father went into the house without looking back. As he lost consciousness, his sister, who had been watching from afar, ran up and cut him down. She told him to run. He did.

Mugisha took money he had saved from his small business selling mobile-phone credit to pay to get to Ethiopia, where he had been told by a friend a refugee camp would be the safest place for him. By a combination of buses and bush taxis, it took him five weeks to arrive at the Sherkole refugee camp, one of seven run by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHRC) in the East African country. After being processed, he was given a blanket and some food and was assigned a bunkmate. He disclosed his sexual identity to UNHCR, but it remained confidential to his new community.

While his new neighbors—from the African Great Lakes region, places like Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and his own Uganda—shared similarly tragic stories of having to leave their home countries to save their own lives, fleeing civil war or claiming political asylum, they were safe from those things inside the camp.

Image by Lia Kantrowitz for VICE.