"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."
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.
"We have a whole culture that's geared to numbing out. We go to movies where we watch people get killed with no feeling at all. We objectify people. People are viewed through the status lens. We're stuck in our cars listening to music. We're geared toward shutting down and not feeling."
She was depressed the year she saw the Oprah episode.
Her father had died. She sat on the couch for four months unable to do anything. After she got involved with the Congolese women, she realized that even her five-year relationship with her partner wasn't right - just another form of self-anesthetization. He didn't support her passion to volunteer. They fought. "I'm a human being, not a lifestyle," she spat at him at one point.
"It's haunting," she says now of their relationship. "It's shocking that we didn't share a value system, that I thought we had and how easy it is to get swept up in the day to day and bond without really being able to step back and look at the bigger picture. There can be an illusion of connection," she says, shaking her head again.
It was that very thing - the power of human connection - that turned out to be her greatest lesson in Congo, even though she had started out with just a desire to make a difference and find meaning.
One of her first discoveries was the difference between pity and compassion. "Pity separates us from other people. It's a top-down approach as opposed to being open-hearted and feeling with someone. But I wouldn't fault anyone for approaching these issues with a sense of pity. It's where we all start.
"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. You have to just show up, give it your best effort."
She was intimidated at first, thinking that she would be viewed as "just a white girl showing up, and they would think I was silly." But the women were immediately warm and generous.
Their joy, despite their hardships and the horror many of them have experienced, overwhelmed her. In her book, one of the women Ms. Shannon writes about is Generose, whose leg was hacked off by machete after she yelled for help when the Interahamwe militias entered her house and killed her husband. They cut her leg into six parts and cooked the flesh on a fire, commanding the six children in her care to eat some. One child refused. They then killed him in front of her.
Still, Generose is happy. "She dresses to the nines," Ms. Shannon reports. "She paints the toenails on her prosthetic leg. If I'm honest I would say that someone like Generose has a deep religious life. I'm not religious. But the women also have a deep connection to other human beings. They value people over things. And if there's anything I've gotten out of this journey, it's knowing that joy comes from this kind of human connection."
She has also learned about her own capacity, not just for simple happiness, but for her ability to grow and adapt. "I'm way off script," Ms. Shannon acknowledges when asked how she feels about many of her contemporaries' focus on marriage and family.
"But I don't feel any pressure to live by a script. I write my own script." She shrugs and smiles with enviable calm. "And I've learned I can kind of make things up as I go along and that it will unfold in an amazing way."