“My job was about hiring perfect-looking people, taking them to a perfect-looking location and then generating an image to sell anything to make people happy,” Lisa Shannon says.
The 35-year-old shakes her head. “Creepy!” she exclaims of her former work as a partner in a stock photography business. “It’s so manufactured. You have to Photoshop the grass and clean up the teeth.” She sighs. “Creepy,” she says again, this time with disbelief. She looks down at her lap, silent for a moment. “It blows me away,” she continues. “My life has gone topsy-turvy in opposite worlds.”
You go in with lots of grandiose dreams about what it means to make a difference, and in the end what you learn is a sense of trust in the process.
The shift began in January, 2005, when Ms. Shannon watched a 20-minute segment on The Oprah Winfrey Show about the plight of women in Congo. Four million people had died at that point in a conflict the world had largely ignored. Women suffer the most because of rape and often sexual slavery. Ms. Winfrey implored viewers not to pretend they hadn’t heard of it – the deadliest war since the Second World War, she and others have reported. Sponsor a Congolese woman for $27 (U.S.) a month, she instructed.
Ms. Shannon did. She sponsored two, in fact. But even that wasn’t enough to quell what she describes in her new memoir, A Thousand Sisters: My Journey of Hope into the Worst Place on Earth to be a Woman, as her hunger to be “the person I always imagined I would be.”
She created a foundation called Run for Congo Women with the goal to raise money to sponsor 30 Congolese women. That soon turned into an organization connected to Women for Women International: Run for Congo Women holds fundraising runs across the United States and in three other countries.
Ms. Shannon, who is based in Portland, Ore., has been to Congo three times as part of her work with her foundation; her latest trip earlier this year lasted two months.
“For me, the lines are very blurry because the work is very personal,” she says when asked what draws her back. “I don’t relate to it as a job. Congo is my life.” When she sponsored those first two women, she had no idea that the cause would become her obsession. “I am wed to Congo,” she says a few minutes later, as though to underscore her commitment. Her business card now reads “activist and writer.”
But her marriage to philanthropy – “I’ve been a full-time volunteer for five and a half years” – came at a cost. She was 29 when she watched that “magnetic” Oprah episode. She was planning to marry her long-time partner, who co-owned the stock photography firm with her. The relationship ended as she became more involved in her volunteer work, and the business floundered. “It was a very big price tag,” she says, adding that she and her ex-boyfriend still receive some royalties from the business.
Does she have regret?
She looks across the table separating us. She is dressed simply: her blond hair loose, in a black dress, no make-up. “No,” she replies quietly. “Because what I’m doing now, I can’t think of a better reason to be alive.” If her stock photography business was about perfection, “Congo is the worst of humanity and the best of humanity in your face. It’s real and it’s raw and it’s right there.”
Now when she looks back on her younger self, she sees someone who had fallen under the hypnotic influence of modern American life.
