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Powerful meditation on helping a thousand sisters

Reviewed by: Lesley Hughes

Posted: 04/10/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

A Thousand Sisters

My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to be a Woman

By Lisa Shannon

Seal Press, 300 pages, $30.50

It is rare for readers to open a book and discover with immediate joy that it will deliver far more than it has promised.

If there is any justice in the highly unpredictable world of modern publishing, A Thousand Sisters will emerge as the iconic example of that exquisite experience.

At first glance, this memoir about one American woman's journey to activism on behalf of the women in Africa appeals to a narrow market, primarily "do gooders," feminists, and weekend runners, as strange a group of bedfellows as one can imagine.

Within a few pages, however, in a hauntingly lyrical and intimate narrative, Lisa Shannon is guiding anyone willing to go with her into the landscape of the tallest questions of human experience, the questions we avoid because they cast shadows and gloom over the contentment of daily life.

Why do the innocent suffer? Why does evil everywhere appear to prevail? Is there any point, any point whatsoever, in individual resistance to a world fixed in its hatred, its violent greed and corruption?

A Thousand Sisters is not a narcissistic rant about white-girl angst. Nor is it the work of a philosopher, an academic or a spiritual guru, yet it is as powerful a meditation on the Power of One as any more celebrated personality could produce.

In 2005, Shannon was a young photographer in Portland, Maine, leading and more or less enjoying the ideal life as portrayed in TV commercials: at age 29, she had her own business, a pleasant home, a devoted fiancé, a minor weight problem. Her life was all about -- her.

It all changed when she caught a glimpse of a journalist talking to Oprah Winfrey, undisputed diva of daytime television, about women in the Congo. In the frenzied competition for the title of World's Worst Place for Women, trumping even Iraq, Afghanistan and pre-earthquake Haiti, Congo is the sad and clear "winner."

Newly awakened to the routine atrocities there -- mass murder, kidnapping, rape, sexual slavery, savage cruelties inflicted on women as pleasurable pastimes for soldiers -- Shannon decided to do the very little bit she could: run. Her first solo 30-mile run has since evolved into an annual event and a national organization called Run for Congo Women.

A Thousand Sisters tells the story of her travels to Congo, the women she met there, and the lessons she learned from her African sisters, among them the true meaning of love and survival.

As of last year, Shannon's run has produced sponsorship of the sort usually recruited for children, of more than 1,500 women in Congo. With comparatively moderate money, those women are raising, nurturing and supervising some 30,000 children.

Even though A Thousand Sisters places readers squarely into the hell human beings have made of Congo (it won't be necessary to read anything else to understand the gruesome conflict and the world's lame response to it), the book is an inspiring call to action, a reminder of the humanity that persists, in spite of overwhelming odds, in all of us.

Lesley Hughes is a Winnipeg writer and broadcaster.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 10, 2010 H9

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