DRC: Lisa Shannon is Running to Save African Women's Lives

Lisa Shannon has run 30 miles straight, alone, on a steep and forested Portland trail. But on this particular rainy February day, she is running just a mile, barefoot, through the Democratic Republic of Congo.

By her side is Generose, wearing a floor-length, lipstick-red skirt, a fitted jacket over a green Run for Congo Women T-shirt, and a strand of pink pearls. She, too, is making her way shoeless, but on one leg, hobbling on mismatched crutches, as her artificial leg is in a state of disrepair. The asphalt is muddy, her crutches keep slipping and she has gone one third of a mile.

But she is smiling. Shannon is also smiling. The group of men, boys and police watching them run — alongside 50 more Congolese women — are smiling, too.

Congo is not a place where people are usually smiling. The decade-old conflict there between warring factions has killed 5.4 million and resulted in the ongoing rapes of hundreds of thousands of women. The women become pregnant from those rapes. They lose limbs, are sexually mutilated, and often times see their children die before they learn to walk.

Shannon, 35, knows all about this after spending more than five weeks in the Congo in early 2007 and chronicling her experiences in the book "A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to be a Woman" (Seal Press/$24.95 hardcover).

It's part of a grass-roots campaign she began, first by launching a series of Run for Congo Women runs, then by joining forces with Women for Women International. In the past five years, more than 4,000 people have participated in the runs, and the money raised has been used to aid African women with cash and education.

"Hopefully Congo will be in better shape for the rest of my life,'' she said during an recent interview in Berkeley, while on her book tour.

It all started in 2005 when Shannon, who co-owned a stock photography production company with her fiance, Ted, was about to go to Paris to celebrate her 30th birthday. The vacation was scrapped when she got strep throat. Sick on the couch, watching "Oprah," she saw a short piece by journalist Lisa Ling that described the conflict born out of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Subsequently, she learned about all kinds of horrible things going on in Africa.

"After the mass killings, the Hutu militias responsible were pushed west over the border into Congo, where they retreated into the forests and began to terrorize the local people," Shannon writes in her book. "The militias that were formed to fight them soon began fight each other. Eventually, half a dozen countries were involved in the conflict, which became known as Africa's First World War."

Educated and living comfortably in a Victorian house with a flower garden, Shannon was stunned as she listened to Ling describe "the worst place earth to be a woman."

And Shannon's own experience made Ling's further description — that it was also the most ignored — ring true.

"I think I was shocked that I hadn't heard of the conflict before,'' she says. "I couldn't have picked Congo out on a map. It's the deadliest war since World War II and I had never heard of it."

The stories of women raising an average of five children each with little food and bare-bones shelter under the constant threat of violence grabbed her soul. She went to the Women to Women International website and sponsored two women at $27 a month. She also pledged to exchange letters with them.

Still, it didn't feel like enough.

"I needed to find something concrete and measurable to do,'' she says. She also set a personal goal: a 30-mile run — alone in the forest to raise money for the cause. People were being killed in the Congo forest, so she would run for nine hours on the Wildwood Trail in Portland — even though she had never run more than 5 miles before.

The response she got after she revealed her plan was tepid.

"People wondered why they hadn't heard of what was going on in Congo," she says.

Her mother, however, always had faith.

"More than anyone I have ever met, Lisa has lived her life being true to herself," says Ann Shannon, 63, of Portland. "She just always checked in with herself to ask, 'Does this fit with who I am?' That was her touchstone, whether it was becoming a vegetarian at 11, dismissing the idea of working at a fast-food restaurant ('No way am I going to handle meat!') ... She followed through on it, whatever the consequences."

While training, Shannon received her first letter from a woman she had sponsored. She told of selling charcoal and chickens to raise money for medical care and how her husband was taken by the Interahamwe ("those who kill together") soldiers.

The worn paper covered with Swahili cursive (translated into English) made Shannon's running project feel concrete. She completed the 30 miles and raised $28,000.

Runner's World, O, The Oprah Magazine and Fitness magazine ran stories on her efforts.

Then, one day as she was preparing to go for a run, she had an unsettling encounter with a stranger who threatened to "hurt her" — just because he could. Something shifted inside, and Shannon decided she was ready to see firsthand the lives she was running to save.

When she arrived in Africa, she was greeted with hugs by women who shared their deeply personal experiences of the trouble the war brought — extreme violence, sexual abuse and torturous murders. Shannon listened to and cried with them. She interviewed them about rapes and how many children they had lost. She videotaped almost everything.

As she learned lessons of survival, fear, gratitude and love, she also learned something about herself: making money in a business photographing size 2 models was not her calling in life.

She concedes that during her time in the Congo, writing the book, organizing runs and speaking, she "stumbled a lot," wandering into places she knew were not safe, getting too close to people she knew could harm her, and grilling women about things they did not want to remember, let alone say aloud.

But when she met Generose, the woman who lost her leg to a machete, she knew her journey was a success.

Here's how she described the encounter in her book: When the two met, Generose had a bone infection and needed a $300 surgery, for which Shannon offered to pay. She examined the amputation scars, mid-thigh and saw the "low-end, make-do prosthetic leg," complete with painted toenails, sitting off to the side. The two women talked more and Generose asked Shannon is she was still running.

"I felt bad to see someone suffer for me, to run," Generose told her.

Shannon says she paused and scanned her memory.

"What did I say in those letters?" she wrote, recalling how she whined to friends about "her mustache tan, losing her boyfriend and her toenails." She wondered, "Did I complain? Was I melodramatic?"

She realized all she could say to Generose was, "it was a privilege."