Feet on the Ground

Portland activist runs to raise awareness and funds for Congo women, returns f rom exploratory visit Some leaders are born into greatness, while others find it accidentally.
Lisa Shannon did neither. She literally ran her way into prominence—one long stride after another, one lost, blackened toenail after another. In early 1995, upon hearing a report on Oprah regarding the humanitarian condition in eastern Congo (particularly the torturous plight of women there), she decided to do something personal and local regarding a very global situation (the worst genocide since World WW II and no one seemingly paying much attention). “I remained haunted by this horror, which continues to be met with stunning silence by the world,” Shannon writes. “What would I have done if I lived in 1939 Germany or if had been aware of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda?”
A casual runner at the time, Shannon set the goal to run 30 miles along Wildwood Trail in Portland, Oregon’s Forest Park: one mile for each woman she hoped she’d find local sponsors for and funnel the support through the nonprofit Women for Women International. Later that year, Shannon completed the run to a large crowd of individual run sponsors and unknown well-wishers alike. Media coverage followed. More people wanted to run. In 1996, the Shannon-inspired Run for Congo Women event repeated itself,
this time including runs in 10 states and four countries. And on June 23, 2007, the third annual run took place, featuring how many runs and where. All total, Run for Congo Women has raised ????? for humanitarian relief and education efforts in the conflict-ridden region less covered by the mainstream media than other African crisis areas. Shannon, 32, a small business owner and creative professional, lives in Portland and holds a B.A. in environment and development from Hampshire College. The Bear Deluxe caught up with her in March, 2007, shortly after her return from a fact-finding trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

TBD Because The Bear Deluxe is an arts magazine, we’re interested in you not necessarily as a runner but as an artist.
LS It’s so refreshing, because no one relates to me as an artist.

TBD Well, we’re not Runner’s World, which has named you Runner of the Year.
LS One of their “Heroes in Running,” one among a few.

TBD But it’s my impression that you’re interested in filmmaking, and I have seen some of your footage from the Congo on local TV. Do you have an interest in creating a short film about your experience?
LS Well, effectively what I did when I was there was interview women about their experience of the war, because I think there aren’t a lot of people really asking the people what they’ve been through. And when you talk with Congolese people here, they’ll always say that they have been directly war affected, and that everyone in the country has been affected by the war in one way or another. But I was really interested in what these women’s personal stories were, and whether or not most of the women we were sponsoring had actually suffered directly as a consequence of the war. So my interviews were centered around that, and I really found that to be the case.

TBD Were they willing to be interviewed individually, or was there fear of being on film?
LS That’s usually for people who are a little more policy-oriented or talking about politics. Congolese women were primarily telling their stories. What you do find is filtered for sure is who they identify as the perpetrator in a given story. So if they were raped, Congolese people will almost never identify another Congolese person as the person who was their perpetrator, even though the Congolese army is responsible for a huge portion of the violence. They’ll usually identify the Interahamwe (the Interahamwe is there and still very much committing violence). Or, for instance, I went to an area where I interviewed women. It’s an area where there were massive attacks for eight years. Everyone had fled to Tanzania to refugee camps, and they are just being returned by [the U.N. High Commission on Refugees]. And when I interviewed the women, a lot of them had just come back from camps within the last six, nine months, and I was asking whether they had suffered really recent attacks. A number of the women had been raped within the last six months, and they identified Burundian militias, although, according to the U.N., there are no Burundian militias present anymore. What you did have in the area were a large number of Congolese army (they’re going through a process called “bersage” right now, which means they’re reintegrating militias, particularly Mai-Mai and other militias in the area, into the Congolese army). But they’re often not paying these people, they’re not training them, so they have no one to be responsible to and no sense of a code of conduct. A lot of the rapes are coming from those groups. When you’re around in this town Bukavu, there are just all these men with guns just hanging out. And it’s known that there are a lot of rapes that they’re responsible for. But a Congolese woman very rarely would identify the Congolese army as the people who raped her, even though they know the militias they were identifying were no longer in the area.

TBD The clips on TV seemed very celebratory. You received a hero’s welcome, and yet there certainly has to be another side to it.
LS Oh, total disconnect between the sort of reception I would receive and then when you actually started talking with the women about what they’d been through. But you have to put it in context. First of all, large portions of the groups I met have been sponsored through Run for Congo Women. It’s not really that they even knew what I had done with the run, but that it was a sponsor coming to visit them. The fact that someone from the U.S. even cares what they’ve been through is something to celebrate. And I think it’s something that you find in Congolese people, which was very striking to me, that even though they’ve been through all of this, Congolese women will still sing and can get down like nobody’s business. I mean they really know how to dance, beat on drums or tubs, and really in some ways have maintained their spirit. So it was always kind of an odd thing, when I would walk into a women’s group and there would be flowers and dancing, but then when we sat down to actually talk about what they’d been through, depending on how the tone was set at the beginning, if they were willing to really talk about it, it was very serious and remarkable how many of the women had suffered through atrocity.

TBD The money raised through Run for Congo Women is administered by Women for Women International. How do they manage their program in such unstable areas?
LS I went to the Congo with that question in mind: Are they operating in areas that have been secured? So they’re dealing with women who have been war affected, but the areas that they are operating in are actually secure now. That’s actually not the case—some of the areas are secure—but they operate in other areas that are very unstable. I was surprised, 30 miles outside of Bukavu a lot of very recent attacks, and their staff are just incredibly heroic for the places that they are going to on a regular basis. But basically what they do is, women are sponsored through their sponsorship program. The sponsor sends $27 a month. Women receive $10 a month that they can use for whatever they need, then $5 a month is set aside to use as an investment in their business for when they graduate. They can use it however they want, but we give them a lot of training in terms of how to invest in a business. And then $7 a month is used toward their education: rights awareness, business training, literacy training if they don’t know how to read—those sorts of programs. How are they managing to do it in areas that are unstable? Well, interviewing women there, I was struck by the kinds of choices Congolese women have on a daily basis. For instance, one woman had given birth to six children. One had died, five were still living. Of the five who were still living, four had malaria, and it costs $20 to have your children treated. No internally displaced person is going to have $80 to have their children treated. So for mothers, when it comes to food and health care for their kids, it’s so expensive. Health care is so expensive. That really is a “Sophie’s choice” on a regular basis for these women. Beyond that, women, if they’re in an area that’s really unstable, they know if they go to their fields to farm, they’ll be raped. So they have to choose whether or not they’ll be able feed their children or be safe themselves, and women are choosing to go to the fields and farm, because otherwise their children starve. So what I found in terms of sponsorship was that it gave women even in the less-stable areas just enough additional choices that it really became an issue of life or death: If a woman was sponsored, and she’s living in an area that’s really unstable, now she has the option of moving to an area that’s slightly more stable and generating a business there.

TBD How much would you say that coltan and the issues around that are the driving forces of instability or is it a part of the greater picture?
LS Those issues are so complex. I’m working with a coalition. Global Witness, Friends of the Earth, World Vision, International Rescue Committee Care, Oxfam—all sorts of organizations are working on extractive industries in Congo at its core. As far as being able to solve the problem, the way that I view it, measuring that sort of thing you have to be so systematic, but what I heard anecdotally, from people who know militias or hang out with militias, or talking to the U.N., looking at maps about where militias are located and whether or not mining is happening—the presence of militias is very linked to mining.
TBD Did you get the sense that the natives there understood that mining and natural resources like coltan in particular were the reason for instability in their country?
LS I had a really interesting conversation with one group of women in that Bukavu region. I was sitting in a group, and we had talked for a while about what they had been through and we asked, “What sorts of questions do you have for us?” And one of them raised her hand and said, “How could I grow to be a woman like you, who has enough that I could help other women?” And it was at that moment that we decided to talk with them about this issue, like, “Well, actually, you are living in a country that many people perceive to be the wealthiest country on the planet. So if there’s a way to encourage your government to let those resources benefit you, then that absolutely is possible for you.” They were shocked. Just the idea that Congo has that wealth there and that it could, someday, if things were done correctly, benefit the people was really shocking to them. This group of women, they really had to take a minute to absorb that. They don’t perceive it as their wealth. The concept that they could one day be affluent or that could benefit them and that that’s their right really is shocking.
TBD Folks aren’t necessarily realizing that a lot of the instability is being created by Western demand for all of these resources then?
LS It depends on who you talk to. There are certainly people in the NGO sector there who are very tuned into that, Congolese groups that are doing work on mining. But in terms of the feeling of the population, I could only answer that anecdotally; that story is the best illustration that I have of that.
TBD Do you advocate pressuring these electronic manufacturers or cell phone manufactures to think about where their coltan is coming form?
LS Well, what I’ve heard about the issue through Friends of the Earth and Global Witnesses is that coltan is very hard to track, because it’s not like you have a pit in the ground; it’s kind of just around. And for that reason it’s very hard for them to track where it’s from. Am I personally a fan of that? Absolutely. I actually wish that the coalition was focusing on coltan as their flagship mineral, because I think there’s definitely a hook for people. I’m not an expert on a practical level with that, because I think that what we’d like to believe is, what’s happening over there in Africa has nothing to do with us. But I think it has everything to do with us. I would love to see certified clean tech products that come from clean coltan.
TBD But your interest is really to raise consciousness in America about the civil unrest and the suffering of the people in the Congo as well as raising money for individual women.
LS Oh yeah. Raising awareness about the conflict in the Congo, because my experience has been that most Americans don’t even know it’s happening. The deadliest war since World War II, and most people don’t even know about it.
TBD Do you have a sense of why that is? Everyone saw Rwanda happen and 800,000 dead, and it was just like, oops. The world’s attention turned the other way after that.
LS I’ve had conversations with a lot people on that subject. Some people say that it’s because it’s complicated and Americans can’t really process how complicated it is, which I find insulting. Some people say Americans only have room in their consciousness for one international issue or conflict. I heard that from someone who was high up in the AP international division in London, which I found stunning, that the choice not to cover Congo in the media was a very conscious choice. I’ve heard from high-up members of the media that they don’t have funding. Now if I can afford to go to Congo, I believe that major networks can afford to go there. But that’s beside the point. Honestly, I’ll tell you what my perception of it is: I think that people don’t talk about Congo because no one’s talking about Congo, and I think people figure it’s not talked about for a reason. They’ve done sociological studies on this, on groupthink. Congo might be one of the most stunning examples of our time of mass atrocities happening, and no one does anything because no one else is looking closely at the situation. But once they know—people have to know in the first place what’s happening in the Congo—I think it’s very much a moral issue whether they choose to do something about it.
TBD You seem to have a strategy on how to approach this so people will listen and not turn the other way.
LS First of all, it’s about doing what you can. No individual American is going to be able to stop the war in the Congo. All we can do is play our part. So we start with something simple and concrete and do that, and that is a huge step. Because what it’s always come down to for me is this question of humanity. If you talk to Congolese people here or Congolese diasporas, again and again the thing that you hear is, “They kill us like animals.” I’ve heard that so many times. Or, “When 4 million people die and no one cares, we don’t feel like human beings.” Women who are begging for their lives are told, “Even if I killed you it wouldn’t matter because you’re not human, no one would miss you.” So this idea that no one would miss 4 million people dying or 1,200 people dying every day, half of those children, to me is the core issue; the idea is that whatever it is we do, however simple it is, that we make the opposite statement. That’s our moral obligation. That becomes the dividing line in terms of who we are as human beings, if we do something simple to make the opposite statement that these lives matter that we’re going to do what we can to help. Just focus on what we have control over, what we can move forward, then that’s enough to just participate on that statement. Some people are really passionate about environmental issues, and some people are passionate about economic exploitation, some people are really drawn to do something for kids, some people love political advocacy.

TBD In addition to women, you also have been interviewing former child soldiers. Can you talk about that a little bit?
LS I spent about four or five days just hanging out at this child-soldier transition house, where there were between 80 and 100 child soldiers. And I got to know them, which was great, and really hear their stories. One child soldier in particular I sat down with on my first day there and talked with him. Kind of a tough-looking guy, tattoos. Seventeen. He had joined—well, he had been abducted when he was 12, and lived with the militia until maybe a month before I met him. So I asked about violence and whether or not he had committed any violence, and he said yeah. I asked for an example. He said there were too many to really recount, but one example was that he was in a village and he was asked to round up all the people in the village and lock them in huts and pour gasoline around the huts and burn them, and if anyone tried to escape, they would shoot them or kill them with machetes. He was clear that wasn’t something he wanted to do but that he was forced to do. I asked how many people he thought he had killed. He said the number would be really difficult to gauge, but his estimate would be somewhere around, either witnessing or participating in, the deaths of about 3,000 people. I asked if he had killed children, and he looked at me like I was completely clueless. What he talked about was just this sense that he felt he would never be normal, and that he wanted to have a normal life. But how do you have a normal life after that? And the other thing about these child soldiers is, what are they going to do next? Even if the security situation gets better in Congo, what do you do with an entire generation of kids who have grown up suffering that kind of violence or committing that kind of violence. What does that mean for the future? Having said that, I was really struck by what incredibly good kids these were. There were just good kids. It was really strange to talk to them. Like this other kid who had been a student before he was abducted by the Mai-Mai, and went there for two years. He was really proud that he had been a student before. But the way he talked about rape; he said he just would rape women, it wouldn’t matter what their age was—girls, grandmothers, whatever. Anytime he saw a woman he would rape her. But now that he was out, all he wanted was to go back to school, and he said, “Even though I come from a poor family, what I really want is to someday be a VIP.” Just a really sincere kid, and if you met him he’s like one of the straight-A students at a local high school.

TBD I was taken by your compassion for the young boys as well as the women. It seems like there is a lot of work to do with the boys as well as the women.
LS Oh yeah. What you hear from the women that have gone though the Women for Women program is, thank you so much for this education, now please educate our husbands, particularly the Congolese army about women’s rights, rape. I mean, there just needs to be some sort of massive education campaign over there. Because there’s this culture of impunity that’s developed where rape now is spreading outside of militias, and it’s the Congolese army, and sometimes civilians, and there are no repercussions. They just have to get that under control. It’s not them who have to get that under control. It’s really the role of the U.N. to support that process.

TBD What sort of education are they getting beyond basic literacy and such? Are they being taught about the political and economic situation?
LS You know, actually, all of Women for Women participants voted. They made sure they registered and they voted. I was in an area that was very pro-Kabila so I heard a lot about that. Their focus is on women’s role in rebuilding society after war. They want to build future leaders. Do they get into the specifics of taking sides in the political process? No. And almost all of the NGOs involved here and involved on the ground there don’t get into politics.

TBD So Women for Women created the ceramics factory where your sisters live. How do they secure an area like that so people don’t just come and plunder it?
LS Oh, this is the best! Because this is an area where a lot of my sisters live and an area where we actually built a house for my sister Generove. It’s right next to the U.N. compound. It’s literally one block from the U.N. compound. So when we built Generove a house, we were building it in this field where there’s like a soldier there 24 hours a day looking over the property. They don’t have problems with crime right there, and if Rwanda invades, it’s as secure as you’re going to get. In terms of Women for Women, everything is in compounds there. Everything has walls and security guards. Everyone has that, so Women for Women compounds are no exception, fenced in, very secure.

TBD What types of other businesses have Women for Women sponsored?
LS A lot of my sisters were learning cooking, soap making—a lot of them sell stuff in local markets, like flour or palm oil or pots and pans. Women for Women does some stuff with international markets, but my understanding is that they really like to keep people focused on the local market for sustainability. It can be so precarious to have a boom in one particular product, and you train people to make that, and then it becomes not popular and they’re left without anything.

TBD So do you think the U.N. needs to be there in a more significant way with peacekeepers?
LS The U.N. is there, and the U.N. would tell you, oh well, it’s the largest peacekeeping force in the world, but what you have to keep in mind is that they have as many U.N. troops in Congo as they have in Sierra Leone, and it’s 24 times the size. Congo is an enormous country. OK, the U.N. is not going to up the number of troops on the ground there. But, for instance, I was just on a call this morning where people were talking about how it’s the U.S. that’s pushing back, wanting the U.N. to reduce its numbers there. That would be disaster. And in terms of mandate, they have a Chapter 7 mandate, which means they can protect civilians. But what they’re looking at right now in terms of policy and mandate is really needing them to take a much more active role in reintegrating the army, and also explicitly saying in their mandate that the U.N. has the right to protect civilians against attacks from the Congolese army. Like if the Congolese army are going to rape or attack or kill civilians, then the U.N. has to be able to [take action]. But the bigger issue is training the Congolese army so that they can actually function and do their job, and to assure that the Congolese army is going to be paid, because they just have no one to answer to at this point. They’re just a bunch of guys hanging out with guns right now. Some people would take offense at me saying that. It’s true! You go through these towns where they have a few brigades, and they’re just kind of hanging out on the street corners and not doing anything.

TBD We thought your journal of your trip to the Congo was stunning. And it’s probably just a week and a half of your trip. I encourage you to write more. But you left us all hanging, because all we received was when you’re going to the lakes where everybody is living on different islands and then it’s done!
LS Yeah, that was just skimming the surface. I went down there, and we went over to this peninsula where the Mai-Mai was very active and making threats, and we went to this one really warm reception, beautiful across Lake Tanganyika. We visit these villages where we’d sponsored a bunch of women, and it was getting kind of late in the day. I was walking back through the village just with my translator and a woman I had been interviewing who had lost 10 children. And I look up, and there are these three men with guns; it was Mai-Mai militia. They walked past, and this other guy started talking to me, wanting me to film him. So, anyway, we got out of there and then got on the boat to go across, and five minutes onto the boat, we look up and there’s a storm. And the guy turns the boat around, and we ended up having to spend the night in the village, with the militia there. Really, really kind of a tense thing. I mean it was fine.

TBD Was that the closest you got to the militia?
LS That was the closest I got to a militia. It was actually not the most dangerous thing that I had done.

TBD What was?
LS It was the second-to-last day that I was there and plans had fallen through, and everyone who had been around had gone back to the States. I was kind of alone, just hanging out with my translator. Someone handed me a scrap of paper saying there were some women who had recently been abducted and returned to their village from the forest. If women are taken to the forest, that means they’re being held as sex slaves there. And it’s in this area that I’d heard all those attacks had happened. I had interviewed women from this town where neighbors had been burned alive in their huts two weeks before. I interviewed them; people had been killed, women had been taken to the forest, like one woman’s 50-year-old mother had just returned from being held in the forest as a sex slave for some time. It’s right next to real Interahamwe territory. So we went up there and, long story short, these U.N. majors took me out to meet these girls, who were two 15-year-olds and one 17-year-old. And we went to one place, which is the sort of place where, if you mention it to anyone in Bukavu, they just get really impassioned, and jaws drop, like, you went where? It’s a very, very active place where a lot of attacks are happening. We stopped and we not only went to Kelehe, which was dangerous in and of itself, but we got out of the car and hiked an hour toward the militias. We ended up interviewing these girls about being abducted. It was exceptionally unsafe, and I didn’t know at the time that Interahamwe actually do attack during the daytime, but it was really inviting problems. We were very much noticed there. It was an area that even the U.N. didn’t patrol. There’s a lot more to the story and what happened that day, but it was not safe.

TBD So your annual run is coming up, but what’s after that? Do you have plans for going back to D.C. to keep working on this coalition?
LS The big push right now is the coalition. One thing I hope you will mention in your article: If your readers are interested in getting involved, the coalition very much is doing work on economic exploitation in Congo, and they need lots of grassroots activists who are interested in this stuff. So if they want a place to plug in and really do something, then the coalition will be a great place for them to do that. Launching the coalition is a major thing that’s going to happen in early summer. We have three basic advocacy points. One, save lives by funding humanitarian relief. Two, keep people safe, which primarily is extend, expand the MONUC mandate, the UN mission in the Congo. And third, end economic exploitation, which is what’s fueling the conflict.

TBD What about for groups wanting to join the coalition? Are there environmental groups involved with this right now?
LS Absolutely. Yes, and we desperately want people to join the coalition. And all that means at this point is reading the unity statement, and if the group agrees with the unity statement, sign on. Because we’re doing letters to the U.N. all the time, and individual organizations have the opportunity to sign on to those letters and support the act. The economic exploitation strategy is complex at this point to me, so I couldn’t tell you exactly what the acts are. But there are lots of opportunities for people to join that working group. If it’s an environmental organization that wants to join the working group that’s working on economic exploitation, or just join in one or two of their actions every year, or have their folks be involved in some pretty simple advocacy on those points, absolutely, we want environmental organizations to join.

TBD You talked about the beauty of the Congo landscape. Do you see any type of environmental degradation?
LS Well, all of eastern Congo should pretty much be lush tropical forest, and it’s all been converted to agricultural land. And where the forest has been cleared—obviously, there are really heavy rains—so there’s erosion and that sort of thing. I know that there are a lot of people doing really wonderful work with preservation of parks. There are organizations that are protecting parks with gorillas. I talked with a number of people who know park guards, because militias are living in the parks. So park guards often are murdered by militias. When you think about that and what environmentalism means to us here, we barely find a way to recycle. And these people are going out and risking their lives every day to protect the park and to protect the gorillas. That’s commitment. That’s being an environmentalist. These are people who are paid, what, $20 a month or something to do it? And then you talk to their kids, and their kids want to grow up and be park guards, too. They want to be conservationists. So it’s interesting to me, even in the most dire circumstances, these people who just have this passion for protecting the environment and protecting Congo’s forests. What heroes. It’s so tempting for us to look at people in Congo as if they’re victims, but, boy, don’t we have so much to learn from them. In terms of the women, their compassion, taking in orphans, or people who are environmentalists and have been doing this work for 20 years with absolutely no pat on the back whatsoever.
Are you including action items for people? I could put you in touch with a couple of things. One is a Congolese organization on the ground who are really doing tremendous work around reforestation, around parks and supporting park guards, to protect gorillas. Very grassroots. They’re called Pole-Pole. They’ve been around for 20 years. The two guys who run it, both of their wives have been raped. Park guards have been killed. They’re very dedicated, not only to the parks, but also supporting people around the park, like Pygmies who were moved out of the park and have a village on the periphery of the park in the middle of a tea plantation.

TBD Why were they moved out of the park?
LS They didn’t want anyone inhabiting the park. They moved them out. And they don’t have a lot in the way of economic opportunities.