A Thousand Sisters

by Lisa Shannon

  ON THE BIG DAY, I’m determined to run the whole trail, against the adamant advice of my trainer. (“You must walk the hills. You will walk the hills.”) At mile twenty-five, I hit Pittock Hill, by far the most brutal stretch. It’s a mile and a half of punishing incline. I inch my way up in a shuffle-run. I call on every mental trick I can muster to get one foot in front of the other. But I run, I don’t walk. Finally, I can see my sister and niece Aria waiting for me at the top with water and pretzels.

  As the trail flattens out, I know I can do it. I’m home free. Better. Though I practically crawl through my last few miles, I’m on fire! A hiker walks past me. A grandma and her fat dog are gaining on me fast. But I refuse to walk. I run every step of those 30.16 miles. As I descend the final hill, a crowd of thirty or so people waits in the cool, early autumn drizzle—family, friends, girl scouts having a bake sale, but mostly people I’ve never met—all cheering.

  I cross the finish line beaming.

  Then I announce the final fundraising totals. We’ve raised more than US$28,000. Eighty Congolese women and their kids will now have different lives. And this is just the beginning.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ms. Congo

  IT’S STILL DARK when we step out of the cab at Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Rain and blustery winds soak my lightweight jogging shorts as I lug an Park. Rain and blustery winds soak my lightweight jogging shorts as I lug an oversize suitcase out of the trunk. I am here with my one never-say-die volunteer: my mom.

  The cab pulls away, leaving my mom and me to set up the First Annual New York Run for Congo Women in a downpour with gale force winds.

  I can’t say we weren’t warned. Last night, we got a call from the park service asking if we plan to cancel due to the severe weather. No way, I told them. Word has spread. After my solo run, I started getting random emails from people who want to get involved. I ran the numbers and landed on a new goal: a million dollars, which will pay for three thousand sponsorships. That’s just a hundred runners (or walkers, swimmers, cyclists, bakers, or whatever) raising money for thirty sponsorships each. Or three hundred people raising money for ten sponsorships each. Or a thousand people, three sponsorships each.

  My mom has appointed herself my full-time assistant. Sounds like a dream come true, but the mother-daughter dynamics are a challenge. Especially since I’ve been trying to keep her organized since I was five. Mom has developed a little habit. During the question-and-answer period of my public appearances, she takes the microphone and talks about the depth of Congo’s suffering, and she always ends in tears. It’s an issue, but she works hard and long. Despite her unmeasured approach and regular fits of panic (the organizational tasks are tough on her nerves), we’re pulling it off.

  Over the year since my Wildwood Trail run, Run for Congo Women events have sprung up in ten states and four countries. Some are simple solo runs, some are community or group runs. Tracey, in suburban Texas, has trained all summer in 110-degree heat. Robin, a mom in North Carolina, runs with her son. Carrie, in Ireland, takes out a permit at a manor house and more than forty people join her on a run around the grounds. My friends in London are reaching out to their church to sponsor their walk. More than a hundred people showed up for the Second Annual Portland Run for Congo Women.

  With all the interest, I decided to take the run on the road. I took out permits in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., hoping to spark a movement.

  We have more than forty registrations for the First Annual New York Run for Congo Women. With this morning’s rainy weather, I’m not optimistic about the turnout. We’ve already gotten several emails asking if we’re still on.

  Yes, we’re still on. When it rains in Congo, women still hide in the bushes from the militia. They sleep in the rain. Kids get sick and die. We’re running today. No excuses, no deterrents.

  My mom takes temporary refuge in a coffee shop a couple of blocks away from the start line, while I hold down the fort in my skimpy running clothes and Mom’s oversize, ankle-length trench coat. It whips and snaps against my blotchy, red, goose-bumped legs.

  Alone, sick of my own spin, I abandon the internal pep talk. I squint to keep the wind and rain from thrashing at my eyes. The driving rain stings, drops pelt me like needles. It’s so cold that I have to concentrate just to hold still and control the reflexive shaking. The banner blows off. I climb up the retaining wall and bury myself in the tree branches to re-tie it with my icy fingers. I find no comfort or inspiration from the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt looming over me as the dimness of nighttime lifts bit by bit. The rain continues unabated. I decide that this moment is officially harder than mile twenty-nine. There will be no break from the cold for hours.

  At eight o’clock, our start time, it’s just me and my mom. A cab pulls up and all the country directors from Women for Women emerge. I just met Christine, the organization’s country director for Congo, in Chicago a few weeks ago. She is a vibrant, open, regal Congolese woman. We are both thirty-one years old and five foot ten, so she instantly branded me her “twin sister.”

  One runner with cropped blond hair shows up in a pink jogging suit. She introduces herself as Lisa Jackson. We wait another twenty minutes in the rain, just in case. Finally, we run the five-mile there-and-back course in the atrocious weather. We finish and escape to a local diner, where Lisa hands me a promotional postcard for her documentary-in-progress, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.

  ASIDE FROM LISA JACKSON, I’ve come across only a few other grassroots Congo activists: The Washington, D.C.-based Friends of Congo, who join me in organizing the first D.C. Run for Congo Women; a six-person-strong Chicago-based coalition, headed by a Presbyterian couple; and a woman in California who collects tea bags and combs to send to rape victims at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. Collectively, we seem to be the movement for Congo.

  But I receive an email from another potential activist who lives in a town nearby. She is a Women for Women sponsor who also saw the Congo report on Oprah. Its subject line: I WANT TO DO MORE. Anxious to foster leadership in what I hope is growing into a movement, I hop in the car and make the three-hour drive to help Kelly engage her church in a Hike for Congo Women project. An ultraorganized, sweet-spoken former model and a devout Christian, she is yoga-chic, with the requisite alterna-girl nose ring and flowing hair. Kelly spends her working life as a Pilates instructor and her free time blogging; she describes herself as a “peacemaker, justice seeker, healer, and dreamer.” Despite the suburban love nest she shares with her husband, at 35 she has the kind of idealism and passion that would make her right at home in a women’s studies class on almost any college campus.

  I’m thrilled to have a Congo partner in crime. We take off to a grassroots advocacy conference in D.C., where we chase policy wonks down hotel corridors, quizzing them about how to launch a movement. At the Darfur discussion panels, I’m the woman in the back of the room asking, “Why is there no advocacy focus on Congo?” After the conference, I continue the outreach effort and pick up the nickname “Ms. Congo” in the process.

  Kelly and I return to Washington to meet with every Africa or relief or genocide prevention organization that will talk to us. We are also spinning plans for a trip to Congo. I leave Ted at home to fend for himself on these trips, and he doesn’t object; we can use the space.

  Kelly and I schlep our way up Pennsylvania Avenue, exhausted after wrapping up our seventh meeting of the day. The Capitol stands in front of us in its undeniable grandeur, but the beauty is lost on me in my end-of-day brain-fry. I’m sticky in my black wool business clothes and weighed down from the oppressive humidity. I want to shake off the day. Instead, we talk in loops, regurgitating and processing everything we heard in our meetings. Almost everyone we’ve met has their hands full with Darfur or HIV or debt relief. Some are very supportive, promising to do what they can. Others are quick to lecture us. “You need to get it: You can’t save Congo.”

  I’m so tired I can’t even
track what I’ve just said. I’ve all but checked out from the conversation when I hear Kelly refer to my efforts as “just pity.”

  Just pity? As a child of New Agers (bless my mother), I’m all for self-reflection. But given Kelly’s quiet manner, I’m surprised at her quick jump from analyzing her own motivations to judging mine. It hits me like a slap.

  So this is what it’s like under the microscope: Now that I’ve stepped out, the pressure is on. I’m expected to work from the exactly perfect, most enlightened and politically correct place in my soul. Flawed methods and motivations will be observed and noted. This is a problem; I have not spent semester after semester studying how to be an activist. I have no idea what I’m doing. Like a lot of people, I’m afraid I won’t make a difference, but mostly I’m afraid of doing it wrong. In public.

  Should I curl up in the fetal position and process? Do I need to stop and go see a therapist or spiritual guide to deal with my ego? Wait to be perfect before I start? What about effort polluted by ego and naiveté, buoyed by grandiose dreams? What if I can’t save Congo, but I try anyway? Would it be better to do nothing?

  Did the abolitionists really think they could end slavery?

  Did the anti-apartheid movement really think it could ban apartheid?

  Does Save Darfur really think they can save Darfur?

  Who do they think they are?

  Defensive, I spit back, “I’m doing this because I care.”

  WHILE I AM IN WASHINGTON, my mom calls to tell me that a batch of letters has just arrived from our Congo sisters. The letters are full of news about their children, their favorite classes in the program, their business activities, prayers and blessings, and their hopes for the first democratic elections in their country since 1960, which are scheduled to take place this summer. My mom faxes the letters to the nearest Kinko’s. One stands out.

  Dear Sister,

  We are doing well here in Bukavu. I was very happy to get your letter and to realize that there is someone caring for me so that I can go on living. As I am handicapped of one of my legs, God arranged it in such a way that you can do what I could not do for my family. May God Bless you for that.

  In 2005, robbers dropped in at night in our home and killed my husband and cut off my leg. They also killed one of my children and burnt my house. Here in Bukavu, I am an internally displaced person. I come from an area located sixty kilometers drive from Bukavu.

  I am a mother of four.

  War is a very bad thing. But I’m thankful God has enabled you to comfort us.

  Thanks.

  Generose

  I march her letter over to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s office, where he’s holding his weekly meet and greet for constituents. I’m the only person who shows up, so we talk for a half hour about Congo. He reads Generose’s letter.

  “They cut off her leg!” he says, shocked. “There are so many horrific situations like this, but what makes Congo stand out is the brutality. When were you there?”

  Embarrassed to admit it, I answer, “I’ve never been to Congo.”

  I’m so tickled that a letter written by a woman in the Congo has landed in the hands of a U.S. Senator. I stop by Union Station and pick up postcards of Washington monuments framed with cherry blossoms and I write to Generose. I make rudimentary diagrams that outline the way the U.S. government is structured, so that Generose will understand how high up her letter has gotten. I suppose I want to offer her one of the few shreds of silver lining available after a loss, the modest comfort that a loved one’s death has not occurred in a vacuum, but that something meaningful might spring from it.

  A batch of new sponsorship packets arrives around the same time. The photos of new sisters always seem to have the self-conscious look of those who are unaccustomed to being photographed, but these four portraits say something else entirely. Though their paperwork looks no different than that of other Congolese women, their furrowed brows and downcast eyes convey distress. They look transparent, beaten down. Something especially bad must be happening in or around the Women for Women center they all attend called Walungu.

  Back at Women for Women’s D.C. headquarters, Sumana, the group’s media person, tells me she wants to pitch my story to national magazines. Later that day we hop across the street to rummage the magazine racks at Borders, hoping to spark some ideas. As I thumb through women’s magazines, Sumana leans over to me and whispers, “I know that woman. She’s with [a major national magazine].” Without blinking, she pounces on her long-lost colleague. They swap updates about the last few years, since their joint stint in the White House press corps. Then Sumana launches into her Women for Women pitch, motioning for me to join them. “You have to hear Lisa’s story. Well, Lisa, you’ll tell it best . . .”

  Pitch myself ? Ugh. I stumble—practically choke—while the reporter listens politely. When I finish, she turns back to Sumana. “We get hundreds of pitches for stories on someone who crawled across the country on hand and knee for some good cause.” She sizes me up. “Have you been to Congo?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  She turns back to Sumana and says, “We might consider a story on letters between women, but just make sure it’s not who you’d expect. You know, not someone who looks like they eat granola.”

  Whoa there, lady. I don’t eat granola. It has way too much sugar.

  Sumana jumps in, trying to salvage the contact. “I know a sponsor who would be perfect . . .”

  I retreat to the magazine rack, trying to hide out behind Elle or Glamour or Cosmo, wondering what part of this perfectly pressed, all-black suit from Saks Fifth Avenue identified me as granola. All I can figure is that my silver 1920s art nouveau choker, a collector’s item, apparently screams “hippie” in this Ann Taylor town. In any case, I don’t need to be told my story isn’t suited for a national magazine. I never dreamed it might be until Sumana mentioned it.

  Fortunately, Runner’s World and O, The Oprah Magazine—and later, Fitness magazine—disagree. Nine months after the meeting with Sumana, they all publish stories about me and the run, and the timing couldn’t be better. Congo legislation is stalled in committee in the House following a unanimous pass in the Senate. It’s cosponsored by Senators Barack Obama and Sam Brownback. (You can’t get more opposite sides of the aisle than that!) But rumor has it the committee chair is holding it up so as to not aid Obama’s rising star. I head over to D.C.’s Union Station, a couple of blocks from Capitol Hill, and stock up on as many copies of O and Runner’s World as I can stuff into my bag, then I join the small constituency from Chicago, about six people total, for their self-proclaimed “Congo Lobby Days.” We lug the magazines up and down the halls of Congress, asking for support of the bill.

  When we talk with a couple of Republican staffers, I give them the magazines in an effort to prove there is a national, grassroots groundswell of support for Congo. They scan the articles. “A million dollars,” says one. “How much have you raised so far?”

  “Fifty thousand,” I say, then quickly change the subject.

  Who knows if it helps, but a handful of Republican staffers promise to call to check the bill’s status, which will put pressure on the committee chair to pass it through for a floor vote. In a week, I will get an email from a legislative aide. The last statement in the Congressional Record, just prior to the unanimous passing of the bill, will be praise for Run for Congo Women and the way it has blossomed into a global effort to support the women of the DRC.

  IF I SCORED POINTS IN D.C., I certainly haven’t scored any at home. I had imagined that my drop-everything-to-stop-a-war behavior would recharge a relationship that has had no space for the past five years. But my all-consuming volunteer work schedule and my Congo-first, business-second attitude have gotten old for Ted. I see his point—I have put our financial goals on hold. But I think I’ve earned some flexibility after putting in years of sixteen-hour workdays and months-long stretches without a day off.

  In any case, people have started
to notice. Long after the event, my mom confesses that at the Portland run volunteers pulled her aside to report Ted’s visible disenchantment with me. It was in the air that day. After the run, he went out for beers with a buddy while a neighbor drove me home. In my post- 30-mile stupor, I threw up out the window (much to the disgust of her teenage kids sitting next to me!) and spent the rest of the afternoon sprawled on the bathroom floor alone.

  At this point, there’s no getting around it. Ted’s icy silence speaks volumes. I’m in breach of contract. I’m not free to do my own thing until delivery of a French country home, a Ducati Supersport, and a new Rolex. Anything less is just selfish.

  The slow burn of betrayal is mutual. I’m desperate for us to try to work it out. But as our relationship descends into a series of seething, resentful fights, I find myself on the defensive, snapping, “I’m a human being, not a lifestyle.”

  On the June day that we were supposed to get married, I can’t help but feel ripped off. In an alternate universe, I would be in the Val d’Orcia, dancing under a string of lights in the courtyard of a medieval Tuscan inn, overlooking ancient olive groves.

  Ted asked me to marry him on New Year’s Day. We don’t believe in long engagements, so we set a June date, but in late March the Italian country inn cancelled our booking (something about an auto accident), and it was too late to find another venue. We said we’d do it next year. Maybe.

  Now Ted is gone. He’s taking an extended “break” in Berlin, while I’ve been bestowed the freedom to date whomever I choose. It is not a freedom I’ve asked for or want.