Unlike many cadets, Christelle Ndongo won’t be entering into the biggest challenge of her life when she enrolls at VMI this fall. The Rat Line, the uniforms and the discipline don’t intimidate her. “Emotionally, it won’t be hard for me to go to VMI because I’ve gone through things much harder than that,“ she said. Three years ago, Ndongo (pronounced DON-go) left her family in Cameroon to live in Florida and play basketball. Suffering from homesickness, she then followed her brother Franck, a VCU basketball player at the time and her only family member in the United States, to Richmond.