One Woman, 'A Thousand Sisters'

After watching an "Oprah" segment on the women of the Congo, Lisa Shannon got up off the couch — and started a movement. She shares her story in a brand new book, and talks to Tonic about her remarkable journey.

Lisa Shannon now has a business card with a title: “Writer/Activist."

With her new book out this week, A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into The Worst Place On Earth To Be A Woman, and her Run For Congo Women becoming a movement, life is evolving for this 34-year-old Oregon native, and she tells Tonic it’s time to slap a label on it — if she must.

Five years ago, while lying on her sofa with the flu watching Oprah, Shannon learned about the women of the Congo. A report by Lisa Ling revealed women who have been gang raped; witnessed the murder of entire families; suffered mutilations and been subjected to sexual slavery. Watching in disbelief, Shannon learned that over four million people have died and hardly anyone in the international community was talking about it. Oprah Winfrey wrapped up the twenty minute segment: “They are hoping somebody in the world will hear their screams for help.”

From her secure life where she ran a successful stock agency company with her fiancé, where she believed she pretty much “had it all figured out,” she found herself asking “Could I be one of those people?”

On her Run For Congo Women website, Shannon explains how she remained haunted by the horror, which continues to be met with stunning silence by the world: “What would I have done“, she asks herself, “if I lived in 1939 Germany, or if I had been aware of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda?"

On her 30th birthday she put out feelers to friends to see if they would help her organize a run to raise
money. Trouble was, she was the only one with enough energy and gumption to sweat it out. A casual
runner, Shannon nevertheless pushed herself out of her own comfort zone.

In A Thousand Sisters she writes: "Because everyone and their cousin's boyfriend do 5Ks and marathons to raise funds for every cause imaginable, I need to take it a step further... I realize I need an effort that can’t be faked: something extreme. Something that gets my friends and family to see how seriously, how personally, I take the situation in the Congo.“

She decided to run 30.16 miles (the entire length of the Wildwood Trail near her Portland home) with the goal of raising 31 sponsorships for Congolese women through Women for Women International — one sponsorship for every mile she ran.

Shannon admits in an interview with Tonic that she has a tendency to be rather “grandiose” with her plans. “But we have a movement now!” she says.

She first aimed to raise a million dollars, a figure she is still eyeballing as they now sit at just over the half-million mark. Shannon feels anyone can do what she has done. She believes that “People don’t believe they can make a difference and are afraid of doing it wrong … if you step out and do it wrong in public it potentially becomes embarrassing, right?”

In an excerpt from A Thousand Sisters, Shannon recalls her first organized run in NYC where she waited in the pouring rain for the other runners. Eventually only one person showed up. She’d had emails from people who had registered asking if the run was on. Her reply: “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.”

In 2007, Shannon traveled to the Congo for five weeks to meet the women who were being helped by her efforts. She cautions that we don’t all have to travel across the world, interviewing victims of war to make a difference. But her prescription for change works for her and potentially for anyone else on the planet. “It’s about showing up and trusting. Even if it’s just you showing up. If you focus on what you have control over, it will matter. Just show up and trust.”

Her favorite model for change is a group of 10 or 15 people getting together, deciding they’re going to do a run and doing it three weeks later. She had a group of moms last year who got thirty women together and each put in $30. They walked a mile together and raised enough for three sponsorships. “It’s fun and a great way to bond friends — spending time together in a really meaningful way,” she says.

Shannon is also affiliated with Enough: the project to end genocide and crimes against humanity. People can easily help make a difference by taking the Conflict Minerals Pledge to commit to purchase conflict-free cell phones, laptops and other electronics. Or co-sponsor the Congo conflict Minerals Trade Act of 2009.

At first, Shannon tells me, her intention was to organize her runs, get the movement going and then return to her life. But that life wasn’t exactly sitting around waiting for her return. As it turns out, Shannon ended up being quite okay with that. The breakdown of her relationship and subsequent business partnership was painful, but as one life faded, another life of incredible connections began to grow. She began to realize around this time, “I’m a human being, not a lifestyle.”

Her book opens with words by artist Edvard Munch that speak of the invisible threads that connect people. Talking to Lisa Shannon, this sense of connectedness is at the core of her person — this author/activist — and it’s at the core of A Thousand Sisters. The way she composed letters in her head, to her future Congolese sisters, while running to keep her going through the blisters, the chafing and loss of toenails. The description of Congolese grandmothers who have lost everything yet, wounded and in pain, they unhesitatingly take in orphans. The women now running all over the globe for Run For Congo Women (upward of 4,100 participants) letting women of the Congo know they are bearing witness. And those (perhaps you) who with a click of their mouse make a commitment to choose a cell phone that doesn’t contain one “conflict mineral” the militias and armies are fighting over in the Congo.

Poignantly, the threads mend in all directions. When Shannon met a room full of fifty women in the Congo — all of whom had been raped — they told her of the choice they make every day: to watch their children starve, or to take the long walk to farm their fields and risk being raped along the way. One woman raised her hand and asked if women are raped in America. Shannon explained that women who have been raped in America have run to raise their sponsorships. One woman raised her hand and asked, “What can we do to manage and improve so we can support other women?”

Fast forward a few years to 2010: The women have their answer. Shannon organized a run by women of the Congo in the Congo.

Generose, one of the sponsored sisters, shows up, hobbling forth on crutches. After the Interahamwe (A Rwandan Hutu Militia) killed her husband, Generose’s leg was cut off, cooked and fed to her six children. The son that refused to eat his mother was shot in front of her. Today, on this muddy day in February, Generose dons a red suit and pink pearls (right). She’s had her hair relaxed and her eyebrows done for the occasion. Shannon stops midstream considering these women, most of whom have never gone for a run in their life: “Forget carbo-loading, I’m going to have my eyebrows done!” she laughs. “It was a perfect up yours to the militia.”

Around 50 women ran along with international aid workers in Bukavu. Around the world others joined in solidarity runs and events in places like Canada, Mexico, Uganda, Denmark and Scotland as well as the US. In Chicago, they chose to run in the middle of the night, running shoes softly imprinting the snow at the exact same time as sandals and bare feet pounded the ground in the Congo. “It was cool to watch them become leaders.” Shannon exudes. Some of them had never run in their life yet they were clocking 8:45-minute miles at the front of the pack. “It spoke to the places in all of us that can’t be touched and the idea that a militia can come and take away everything, their whole family … even their leg, but they can’t stop the Congolese women from giving back, and they can’t steal compassion. I just saw that so clearly that day," Shannon says. "I really think it was the best day of my life.”

Click here to purchase a copy of A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into The Worst Place On Earth To Be A Woman, or to find out about upcoming book events with Lisa Shannon.

Click here to get info on starting a Run For Congo in your area.

Photos courtesy of Eric Ronzio, Lisa Shannon and Michelle Hamilton.