We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Arouna Ntosengeh a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Arouna , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

The biggest risk I ever took was to leave my small town and going to the economic capital Douala to look for a life more better. And when I got there I was living with people who were like my younger brother from my village Foumbot. And when I got there I realized they were addicted to crack. After refusing to be involved in taking it, I tried to advise them to stop and it cost me my spot in our shared house because the owner of the house was the one that got them involved, because he himself was also using crack.

So I became homeless. That’s how i became a boxer. When I was homeless I started training, Because when I was living on the street it was very hard. There was a lot of violence, seeing people steal from others, taking their money, seeing them get beat up, so it made me decided to physically train because I didn’t want to get taken advantage of. I realized the street was like an ocean and the smallest fish get eaten by the biggest fish, and I wanted to be strong and person of the sharks, not to take advantage of other people like they did, but to protect myself.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a boxer. But I want people to know, it doesn’t matter where I am today, I always think about where I came from. I always think about if I would’ve gave up on my dream, I would never be in the US, I would never have become an international boxer who represents his country. I went from being someone homeless sleeping outside to training as a boxer.

I became a boxer because one day a man approached me, I didn’t know he was always watching me train. He believed I could be a great boxer someday. I didn’t take it seriously; I just thought it was a compliment. He approached me again a few days later and asked if I could escort him somewhere; I agreed. That’s when he brought me to the boxing training camp and I started seriously training.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When I was homeless the man who discovered me brought me to the New Bell Douala training gym and introduced me to the trainers and they said doubting me “we know a lot of homeless people who came here and started training, but they run away”. And of course they run away because life was so difficult. It was not east to train so hard and go back everyday to sleep on the bench, so that’s why they were giving up. But that word of discouragement was what motivated me to keep working. I told myself I would never run away, even when in the first week I was feeling so bad after training- I kept working.

I remember when I was representing my country and I was in a 5 star hotel in Mozambique I started crying in the middle of the night, I thought to myself I was sleeping in the middle of the street on a bench and because I believed in myself and never gave up I was sleeping in a 5 star hotel bed because of boxing. I thought about the other homeless people in the street and if they had known where I was maybe they would start training or believe in themselves.

So what I want people to know is that the sport of boxing can change a life and a generation. That’s where I am today, boxing changed my life. Boxing took me from nowhere to somewhere, it took me from nothing to something. I never imagined myself one day being in the US, I never even imagined myself sleeping on a bed where the national team was paying it.

So I want to encourage anyone who has a dream, everyone who is in the streets, anyone from around the world who has a dream, who may not even have a place to rest after training- train and work hard- what I am telling you is what I went through! I want to encourage the youth in Africa and all over the world, no matter the situation you are going through, please never give up, work hard, and believe in yourself and one day you will see the results of your hard work.

Have you ever had to pivot?

There was only one moment when I wanted to change my decision on boxing. When I won my first national title, the moment I became the Cameroon National Champion – the amount of money I received for the title was only ten dollars. Being a national champion and number one in Cameroon with all the money I spent and time training, the money I received from the government was only ten dollars. I said to myself I will stop boxing because it’s not even making me money. But then I thought to myself, I am not even doing boxing for money, when I first started I only did it as a way to protect myself, to get a good workout, to look and feel strong. So, in the beginning of my career I started to look for something I could be doing to make money, so I started selling fruit in the market, and during my training times I found someone to cover my stand while I was boxing.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ntosengeh/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pepe.ntossegeh
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@ntosengeharouna