A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [41]
Astonished, they nod emphatically. “It’s just like we were treated.”
They study me for a moment, pensive.
Sifa adds, “It is as if we are the same.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Friend from Far Away
LIKE A BRIDE on her wedding day, I peek out of the second-story window of the Women for Women office in Bukavu, watching fortheguests window of the Women for Women office in Bukavu, watching for the guests to arrive. Today is my first meeting with my sisters! As women trickle into the courtyard, I don’t recognize anyone and I’m not sure I will, since all I have is a tiny photo of each of them. I return to the coffee table piled with bright green gift bags, each stuffed with carefully selected trinkets: stickers, sparkly pencils, balloons for the women’s kids, pastel-colored plastic head-bands, little journals. I look to Maurice for reassurance. “Do you think the gifts are silly?”
“No,” he says. “It is only to show you are happy to meet them for the first time. You send them money every month, so they’ll be happy.”
I get up and go back to the window again. Three women in the courtyard look at me, point, and wave.
“Is that them? Are they my sisters?”
“Yes,” a staff member says.
I can’t wait. I rush downstairs to embrace them. Within a minute, I am surrounded by Women for Women participants, all getting in on the group hug—even though most are not my sisters! I give them each a warm embrace in honor of their sponsors who will never make it to Congo.
My sisters and I slip inside a meeting room. Much to my surprise, I recognize them all from their photos. We show each other the letters we’ve kept and together survey their sponsorship booklets, which contain passport-size cards that list their names, monthly slots where they sign for their money, and a line that reads, “Sponsor: Lisa Shannon/Run for Congo Women.”
The woman sitting next to me has a baby strapped to her back. “Who’s your beautiful little one here?” I ask.
Maurice translates her answer. “When she bore the child, she was on the rolls here. She named her after you. The child’s name is Lisa.”
I take the baby from her mom and hold her on my lap. This little Congolese Lisa was not named after me because of Run for Congo Women, but simply because I wrote her mom letters from America when she was pregnant.
These twenty women have just finished the education part of the Women for Women program and await vocational skills training. They are all from Bukavu. The first sister introduces herself. “I became a seller of firewood, but the children were ill, so I spent all my money on medicine.”
I ask her, “So you had to stop selling wood, but now that they’re better you can sell wood again?”
“Yes, I can start to sell wood again. If I have money. . . .”
“You have nothing left from your sponsorship funds?” I’m concerned, and it shows.
And so I’ve opened the door, setting the tone for the remainder of the meeting.
“With eight children, I was selling maize flour and wood. But now it’s difficult after paying the hospital bill,” she says. “Now it is difficult selling wood also, because my children got ill. I paid sixty dollars and that was all the money I had. Now I have no income.”
Oddly, every sister seems to sell firewood or fish or clothes, and every sister just spent her sixty dollars in graduation seed money on emergency medical care for her kids and can no longer work . . . unless she gets more seed money. Ugh. This is not what I was expecting to hear.
I’m sinking. As we go around the room, the conversation is all about angling for more money. I realize I’ve failed to meet a basic expectation. The term “American sponsor” seems to imply “unlimited source of cash.” But with more than two hundred sisters, I can’t afford even five