Senior Spotlight: Celine Kongolo, Greensboro College Middle College

One Tuesday last fall, as she sat in the Hemphill Library, Celine Kongolo teamed up with her best friend for three hours, and they worked together on their personal essays to get into college. Celine wanted to make sure everything sounded good, flowed well, and made sense before she let it go.

 Celine wanted UNC-Chapel Hill; her best friend, Sandy Thach, wanted N.C. State. So, these two seniors from Greensboro College Middle College worked across from one another handing their essays back and forth and acting as each other’s last set of eyes.

Later that night, 10 minutes before their essays were due at midnight, they turned on their laptop cameras and connected to one another so they could count down together: “5,4, 3, 2, 1.”

Then, at the same time, they pushed send.

Their wait had begun. Celine knew all along she wanted to go to college, a dream she has had since she was a little girl. Her dream first materialized halfway around the world when she lived in her grandmother’s house. That’s when she began thinking about what she wanted to be.

‘I’ve Found My People’

Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Last year, more than 17 million people called Kinshasa home. But it wasn’t too large for Celine. It’s because of her grandmother.

Her parents lived about 20 minutes away, closer to their jobs at a water company where her grandfather was a director. Celine lived close because her parents, particularly her grandfather, wanted her to go to a good Catholic school. And a good Catholic school was no more than a 15-minute walk from her grandparents’ house.

Her grandmother would wake her up before school, fix her oatmeal with sugar and powdered milk, or pick an avocado from their backyard tree and mix it in with an omelet of tomatoes and onions. Then, her grandmother would walk her to school.

Celine would be in her white shirt, plaid skirt, white lacy socks and black Mary Jane shoes, and she’d be holding her grandmother’s hand and practice speaking her French, the language she spoke in school. After school, her grandmother would meet her, walk her home, telling her what’s for dinner in their native language known as Lingala.

Celine was pre-K young. But even as young as she was, she began to understand the importance of education because her family cared about education. She then started to dream about becoming an engineer, a lawyer or a doctor. She didn’t know. But she knew she had to set a goal and work hard in order to reach what she wanted to become.

Life at her grandparents’ house was idyllic. Her life in her country was not. Since 1996, conflict in the eastern section of the country has led to six million deaths, according to the Council of Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan organization in New York City. A lot of people were dying, the country’s leaders were stealing from the government, and Celine’s parents started saving money and working overtime. They wanted to be able to leave the country and come to the United States, where some of their relatives lived.

It took at least two years to save enough money, and when Celine was six, her parents moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to live with her aunt. Five months later, they moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, to have their own place and be near relatives. Celine learned English by watching “High School Musical” over and over.

In 2016, Celine’s family moved to Greensboro to be around more family in a more affordable place to live.

Celine started the fourth grade at Guilford Elementary. She felt she didn’t belong in Nebraska and Illinois. Greensboro was different. It was friendlier, more diverse, and when she walked into Guilford Elementary, she discovered students just like her.

And like her, they came from Africa.

“It was liberating in a way, you know?” Celine says. “I was always quiet because I didn’t understand anything, so I kept to myself. But when I found people who could understand me and relate to me, I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve found my people.’”

An Uncertain Future

In late January, she got a call after school from one of her friends. Check your portal, he told her. Celine opened her laptop and saw she was accepted — and accepted into UNC’s honors college known as Honors Carolina. Celine was ecstatic, and she immediately joined a group chat online with Sandy and a few of their friends from Greensboro College Middle College (GCMC).

That’s what high school was for Celine. After two years at Smith High, she transferred to GCMC her junior year. She found small classes, tight friendships, and teachers who challenged her intellectually and other ways as well. Like Grey Jones, her teacher for AP literature and composition. He would tell her and his other students often: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

The quote comes from writer Oscar Wilde. But Celine felt that quote reminded her to be who she wanted to be. And at GCMC, a place that gave her the freedom to choose her classes, Celine felt she belonged. Her classmates were driven, supportive, and intellectually curious. Just like her.

Celine became the president of the GCMC’s National Honor Society and a member of its yearbook staff and the Teen Grantmaking Council at the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro. In November, she joined the Governor’s Page Program, where she met then-Gov. Roy Cooper and spent a week with smart, like-minded teenagers.

“I felt like I was finding myself again,” Celine says of her time at GCMC.

Yet, Celine worried about her future. And she worried that would never change.

Discovering Sweet Relief

Celine began thinking more and more about how her family would be able to pay for UNC-Chapel Hill. Her dad is a mechanic; her mom works for a company that builds gas pumps; and Celine was the fourth of their five children. Her parents had just bought a house, her dad had started a new job, and doctors had just operated on his left knee.

As Celine thought about cost, she began to think about what could be more affordable. Maybe, UNC-Greensboro. Maybe, GTCC. Maybe some other alternative to help her parents. But she held out hope for UNC-Chapel Hill, and three weeks after getting her acceptance letter, she had this feeling to check her portal once again.

She was washing dishes on a Friday, thinking about alternatives and the cost of college, when she got to thinking about the cost breakdown for UNC-Chapel Hill would be. She logged onto the portal and saw under total cost one figure: 0. Just a 0.

“This is not real!” she kept telling herself.

Celine started praying and called Sandy about what she discovered.

Celine later found out she had received the Carolina Covenant scholarship, which provides stellar students from low-income families the opportunity to graduate debt-free through scholarships, work study and grants.

“Someone else believed in me and my goals and said, ‘You need money? Here you go! Attend for free,’” Celine says today. “And now, I’m excited and motivated to work harder. I don’t know who was sitting behind that desk and clicking the numbers, but they had enough faith in me.”

Celine graduated May 27 from Greensboro College Middle College, and this fall, she won’t have to worry about paying for college. Because of her hard work, her tuition — and every other cost associated with her education at UNC-Chapel Hill — will be covered.

Celine will now major in political science and business administration and set her sights on going to law school and becoming an attorney, one of her dreams she had as a little girl. Celine wants to become an immigration attorney and help other immigrants reach their dreams.

Just like her.

“Young Celine would think I’m cool,” Celine says. “I came up with a plan when I was younger, stuck to that plan, and I still had time for me. And her dream, it didn’t fail.”

Jeri Rowe, a former columnist at the News & Record, is the Editor at Large at Our State Magazine. This content was provided through Guilford County Schools.