How Do I Give Back?
There is a question that has followed me for most of my life: how do I give back?
I ask it because I know what it is to have nothing and be given everything. Eight years in a refugee camp teaches you what a blanket means, what a stranger’s kindness weighs. When I finally reached Seattle, I carried two things: the memory of exile, and a debt I could never repay — only pass on.
So I went to work in a factory. And on weekends and evenings, I started helping refugee families — twenty-five of them at first — find housing, fill out forms, learn the bus routes, enroll their children in school. Nobody paid me. Nobody asked me to. The question just wouldn’t leave me alone: how do I give back?
In 2016, that question became an organization. The Congolese Integration Network was born from a simple conviction: that everyone who arrives here carrying loss deserves more than survival — they deserve belonging. A home beyond borders.
Ten years later, I look at what that question built. Classrooms. A housing movement. Amani House. The Welcoming and Healing Center rising in SeaTac. Thousands of our neighbors — Congolese, and now from everywhere — who can say: I belong here.
On Friday, October 23, we gather at the Seattle Airport Marriott to celebrate those ten years — and to launch my book, Echoes of the Ancients (https://www.amazon.com/Echoes-Ancients-Restoring-Universal-Salvation/dp/B0HBLYXPRH), which asks the question underneath all the others: where is Afrika in the story of us all? The first copies in the world will be placed into hands in that room.
This is the first in a weekly series of stories — from my life, from our community, from the everyday work of CIN. Stories of exile becoming belonging. I hope you’ll walk with me through them.
And if the question how do I give back lives in you too — here is one way: help us fill that room on October 23, or fuel the next ten years with a gift.
Newest activities:
Get gala tickets — Oct 23, Seattle Airport Marriott:https://cinfundraiser2026.auctria.events/
Explore CIN’s programs: https://www.cinseattle.org
With gratitude,
Dr. Floribert H. Mubalama
Founder and CEO, Congolese Integration Network
Letters Home is CIN’s weekly story series — personal experiences, everyday CIN life, and the road from exile to belonging.
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