Overview:
Lisa Shannon had a good life — a successful business, a fiancé, a home, and security. Then one day in 2005, an episode of Oprah changed her life. The show focused on women in Congo, a place known as the worse place on earth to be a woman. She was suddenly awakened to the atrocities there — millions dead, women being raped, children dying in shocking numbers. It was then that Lisa realized she had to do something — and she did. A Thousand Sisters is Lisa Shannon’s inspiring memoir. She shares her story of how she raised money to sponsor Congolese women beginning with one solo 30-mile run and then founded a national organization, Run for Congo Women. The book chronicles her journeys to the Congo, meeting the sponsored women and hearing their stories. Along the way Lisa is forced to confront herself and learns lessons of survival, fear, gratitude, and love from the women of Africa. A Thousand Sisters is a deeply moving call to action for each person to find in them the thing that brings meaning to a wounded world.
This book is a shock to the system. A Thousand Sisters follows the unorthodox story of Lisa Shannon, the founder of the now successful and widely supported Run for Congo Women. The book chronicles Lisa’s evolution from the time she first hears of the systematic rapes in a foreign country to the end of her second trip to the DRC. Much less a story of the development of the organization, and much more a personal account of her discovery of the realities in the DRC, the narrative style of the book forces the reader to face the suffocating systems Congolese women must battle every day. Lisa visits women she met through Women for Women International in remote, rural villages with little to no UN presence. Warring factions exchange power of small areas, making political alliances tenuous, temporary guarantees of protection. Foreign aid workers are so jaded they do not consider rape a threat to security. Rape itself is no longer brutal enough: soldiers have resulted to torture and macabre acts of bodily destruction so vile I can’t even bring myself to reprint them. When women are not surviving attacks, they are trying to survive absolute poverty with little to no education, no job prospects and a completely unstable country. In the years that have passed since Lisa Shannon first watched Oprah’s special on rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the situation has received much more attention, but Lisa was one of the first individual Americans to take this issue to heart so personally.
I see this book in two parts: Lisa’s advocacy in the states, and her actions in the DRC. Much like the premise of Eat, Pray, Love, Shannon finds her comfortable life disrupted by the realization that she is not fulfilled. After losing her beloved father, she begins training for a run to raise money for women in the DRC, specifically the South East area of the country where fighting and rape has been most concentrated, and in the process closes her business, sells her house, and ends her long-term relationship. She starts organizing races for other women across the country, and news of her organization spreads. Lisa then decided to travel to the DRC to visit some of the women she has sponsored through Women for Women International.
“I can't imagine a more perfect book for arousing the power of American women (or women and men everywhere) to rush to the defense of our Congolese sisters. Lisa Shannon, runner extraordinaire, has with this forthright and readable book, crossed the finish line into the way of life the remainder of our time on this planet demands: she has entered the land of courage, compassion, and a fierce determination to stand by those who need us, where everyone understands they must be—our lives depend on it—a citizen of the world.
—Alice Walker
“While reporting for the Oprah Show , I called the Democratic Republic of the Congo the ‘worst place on earth.’ When Lisa Shannon saw my report, rather than turn her back, she took it on. Her commitment to the victims of one of the world's greatest tragedies exemplifies the best in humanity. Her powerful story is an inspiration to all of those who think their voice is too small to change lives.”
—Lisa Ling, journalist
"Congo is usually portrayed as hopeless and its women as victims. Lisa Shannon shines a spotlight on the hope that emanates so stubbornly from this complex country, primarily through her loving portrayal of her Congolese sisters. Instead of victims, these women are determined survivors, three-dimensional human beings who deserve our respect and solidarity."
—John Prendergast, co-founder of The Enough Project, and co-author of Not On Our Watch with Don Cheadle
“As global consumers we all share some responsibility for the tragedy in the Congo. Lisa Shannon's riveting, personal narrative lays bare the human cost of that relationship, through a personal journey like no other into the heart of the Congo.”
—Robin Wright, actress and activist
“I wish that every woman and man in America were as stirred to outrage and action as Lisa Shannon by what is happening in today’s Congo."
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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