Lisa Shannon: “I Had To Do Something!”

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It was the popular Oprah Winfrey program and “there I learned about Congo, widely called the worst place on earth to be a woman. Awakened to the atrocities – millions dead, women being raped and tortured, children starving and dying in shocking numbers – I had to do something,” says this woman who, at 29, ran a photo business together with her boyfriend, in Portland (Oregon). 

That same year, in September, Lisa Shannon ran her first marathon – more than a marathon, actually, 48 kilometers – to draw attention to this serious problem and raise some money. It took her almost eight hours and lots of pain. But she refused to give up. “Every half-kilometer represents a real woman’s life and the lives of her children. They will know that someone cares, that their lives are significant,” she said later.

With that first run, she raised 28,000 dollars. In 2006, she completed her second 48-kilometer run, but this time joined by hundreds of other runners in ten states in the USA and four other countries, namely Germany and Ireland. The movement, Run for Congo Women, was thus born. 

The money they raise goes to support Congolese women through a group called Women for Women International. This group sponsors more than a thousand war-affected Congolese women, who are raising more than 5,000 children, war orphans mainly. “They’ve lost everything, but they take children in when they can’t even feed their own properly,” says Lisa. 

In January-February 2007, she made her first travel to Congo. For five weeks, she visited alone the South Kivu province. She went back in 2008. She could meet some of the women sponsored by her movement and even find, to her surprise, that one of them had named her newborn baby Lisa, probably the only one with such a name in the whole country. 

Lisa, who is now 34, has just published her first book, A Thousand Sisters, where she details her experience in Congo. “In a place where no man with a gun is the good guy, I confront militias, massacres, murder cover-ups and unspeakable horror. Along the way, I am forced to learn lessons of survival, fear, gratitude and love from the women of Congo. A Thousand Sisters is a portrait of the world’s deadliest war through the intimate lens of friendship. It is a story of passion, hope, and my journey to carve out human bonds that cannot be touched by terror,” she wrote.  

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