Several years ago, Emel was homeless, lonely and uncertain about the future. Having fled his home in The Gambia due to anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination, Emel—who prefers not to give his full name due to safety concerns—was living on the streets in Senegal and relying on the support of fellow asylum-seekers who offered him food and shelter.
Through a friend who had found asylum in Canada, Emel was introduced to Duane Lecky, a member of the congregation of St. John the Divine Anglican Church in Victoria, B.C. who with his husband had invited Emel’s friend to stay in their home. Lecky organized a GoFundMe campaign to provide food and housing for Emel while he navigated the asylum process, eventually resettling in Canada in 2019.
Today, Emel lives in Ottawa and works as a personal support worker while studying to become a nurse. He is also the founder of Rainbow Haven, an all-volunteer organization that seeks to provide shelter and sustenance for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers as they attempt to find refuge in safe countries.
“My own experience as an asylum seeker showed me [for the] first time how vulnerable LGBTQ+ people, refugees, are,” Emel says. “Many of us flee one dangerous situation only to find ourselves in another, struggling with homelessness, exploitation and lack of resources. I knew that if I survived, it was because of people who stepped in to help me, like Duane … So I wanted to do the same for others.”
Rainbow Haven currently operates two safe houses in Dakar, Senegal and is working on setting up a third in Kenya. Emel stays in regular contact with asylum seekers living in these apartments, holding regular meetings and sharing updates, while working to find more people who can support the organization.
Lecky is chair of Rainbow Haven. He says helping LGBTQ+ asylum seekers grew out of St. John the Divine’s history of support for refugees and queer rights. Its refugee committee settled many newcomers around Victoria over recent decades.
Like many Anglican parishes across Canada, St. John the Divine has a dwindling and aging congregation and no longer has the numbers it used to for handson refugee work, Lecky says. He sees Rainbow Haven as a way of continuing the church’s refugee ministry and merging it with its longtime support for LGBTQ+ rights.
The friend of Emel who lived for a time with Lecky and his husband—who, Lecky believes, is also the last refugee St. John the Divine sponsored—played a key role in Rainbow Haven’s origins.
In 2014, The Gambia’s National Assembly amended its criminal code to impose penalties of up to life imprisonment for “aggravated” homosexuality. Then-president Yahya Jammeh called homosexuality one of the “biggest threats to human existence” and vowed to “fight these vermin called homosexuals or gays the same way we are fighting malaria-causing mosquitoes, if not more aggressively.”
“It became really dangerous,” Lecky says of conditions facing LGBTQ+ people in The Gambia. “Large groups left, including friends of these guys who were living with us or had lived with us.” He recalls, “The guy who was living with us, he said, ‘We’ve got to help them.’ So we started just helping this one group… They were friends of [his] and we provided them with enough money for barebones food and rent on an apartment.”
One of those refugees Lecky helped was Emel, who had fled to Senegal from The Gambia. At that time Emel was sleeping in the streets, along with 10 other Gambians he knew who were also seeking asylum.
Raising funds through GoFundMe with friends and family members, Lecky sent money to cover housing and shelter costs for Emel, who was able to emigrate to Canada after two and a half years seeking asylum. He found a job at IKEA before starting classes to become a personal support worker, and eventually founded Rainbow Haven.
National ecumenical organization Citizens for Public Justice recently donated thousands of dollars to the group, said Lecky. He says he foresees the group eventually taking the form of a single “hub” committee with many “spoke” committees, each managing a safe house.
“Our vision is that there’ll be dozens if not hundreds of these spoke committees, each with a safe house somewhere,” he says.
