By Simone Dominique
Sitting at a local cafe in South Miami, Florida, Kaleba Ngoie-Kasongo talks in a gentle voice about the past decade. One glance at her diminutive frame – clad in a vibrantly-colored jacket, jeans, and ballet slippers – it’s easy to imagine her going through the comfortable routine of a sun-filled, South Florida existence. But Kaleba is no ordinary woman. For her, there is nowhere she could live contented, knowing that hundreds of thousands of women and children in the Democratic Republic of Congo are victims of brutal rape as a weapon of war.
Kaleba was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and moved to the United States when she was 17. She received her Bachelor’s in Business Administration from Northwood University and went on to work in the corporate world at companies like Oracle and Citibank. In 2005, on a visit to the DRC, Kaleba witnessed the horror of dead bodies lying on the street: conflict and a humanitarian crisis left over 6 million people dead in her country. Children as young as 1, and women as old as 90 were raped, tortured, and mutilated as an act of genocidal war. Kaleba decided to do something about it.
She travels into the DRC where her 501(3)(c) nonprofit Hear Congo helps rebuild ‘shattered lives’ by teaching literacy, healthcare, leadership, and sustenance to women and children. Each woman in her program, in turn, pledges to help 100 other women. Hear Congo is small but its impact is big. Thousands of lives have been directly helped, including those of children conceived by rape. The program is now partnering with governments and corporations for peacekeeping and leadership development.
To this day, instability continues in the northeastern region of the DRC; it has hampered Kaleba’s efforts—but not her will. She and her Hear Congo staff continue to do their extraordinary work, and, contrary to what we should be doing with our world’s brightest minds who are solving our planet’s biggest problems, they have been doing their life-changing work without any compensation.
Pictured– Kaleba Ngoie-Kasongo, Hear Congo President and Board Member of UN Women in Miami, Florida, one week before heading to the DRC. Kaleba is wearing a jacket created by members of her program. She lives in Miami with her husband and 3 children.
