Jolie Sifa Kpaka quickly became the talk of the town when she dared to become the first female teacher at the Christian Bilingual University of Congo, a school run by the nonprofit Congo Initiative. Jolie had faced many hardships in her region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, including a civil war that had forced her out of her home. But now she was grappling with a different kind of challenge: could she begin to overturn deep-seated societal norms in order to offer hope to women and to a new generation?