Alumni Spotlight: Chantale Zuzi featured on the cover of New York Times!

EXCITING NEWS! RefuSHE alumna Chantale Zuzi was featured on the cover of The New York Times! Read Nicholas Kristof's piece about Chantale's remarkable story: One Girl's Journey After Her Grandma Said to Kill Her.

Chantale's journey started in war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, and has brought her to the U.S., where she has launched a non-profit organization, Refugee Can Be, dedicated to empowering refugee girls/women in her former settlement of Rwamwanja.

An excerpt from Mr. Kristof’s piece: “Zuzi, who is inspiration personified, was born with albinism about 23 years ago (she’s not sure of her exact birth date) in a hut in a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was an inauspicious beginning: Her maternal grandmother wanted to kill her, thinking that her pale skin was a curse. Fortunately, her parents protected her. … Then in June 2014, catastrophe: A rival ethnic group attacked her village, burned her home and murdered her parents. … At 13, Zuzi was now an orphan and an elementary school dropout, living in a refugee settlement and spending her days looking after her younger siblings. But life was dangerous for people with albinism, for in parts of Africa they are sometimes killed so that their body parts can be used for witchcraft. So at 16, feeling unsafe, Zuzi fled by herself to Nairobi, Kenya.”

That’s where Chantale found RefuSHE, which provided safe shelter, education, mental health services, and a tight-knit community of refugee girls and young women.

“RefuSHE helped all these young women and let us know that we were not alone,” Chantale said at a RefuSHE event in 2021. “They gave us training sessions, academic studies. We had a tailoring class in which we learned how to sew scarves, dresses. We had Artisan’s Collective, in which I learned how to make scarves, bags and many varieties of designs. We slept well, we got treated when we were sick and most importantly, we got food to fill our stomachs. We treated one another like sisters and helped each other with our children. The training that they gave us helped us to realize our dream when we leave the organization.”

In September of 2018, when she was 17 years old, Chantale began a new phase of her life when she resettled in the United States. Chantale completed high school in just three years, graduating with highest honors and distinctions in Perseverance and English Literature.

From the New York Times story: “While at Wellesley [College], Zuzi became a refugee activist mentored by Hillary Clinton and Angelina Jolie, working with the United Nations, speaking at conferences and giving a TED Talk. Because her life had been transformed by education, she founded a nonprofit, Refugee Can Be, to educate and lift up girls in the Rwamwanja refugee settlement in Uganda where she had once lived. She also became a U.S. citizen and helped eight of her nine siblings move to the United States as well.”

Chantale is the embodiment of refugee resilience. Visit RefugeeCanBe.org to learn more about Chantale and her new organization.