A Thousand Sisters_ My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman - Lisa Shannon [44]
In fact, it hasn’t happened again. All of my subsequent meetings have been ebullient celebrations. I tell the women I meet about Oprah, my run, the movement, all the women who support them from America. Then we go around in a circle and each tells me about “the trouble I got from war.”
The war stories are endless. But so are the success stories. And the thanks.
I’ve learned a couple of Swahili words, just from hearing them so much: Aksanti, thank you, and Aksanti sana, thank you so much. And again, Furaha, meaning joy or “I am happy.” Furaha sana. So much joy. I am so very happy. “We no longer rent. We got our own land. I pay them to work on my farm.”
“I lost all things, burnt. I lost dignity. You dignified me.”
“I regained joy.”
“The help you are sending helps us to be human beings, really.”
“Today I can really breastfeed my baby because I am eating well.”
“If only you could open my heart to see how happy I am to see you. I am buying hens. Whenever I am hungry now, I slaughter one.”
“If I was a bird, I would fly and meet you in America.”
“If my kid grows up, it is because of support from you.”
“I don’t know what measurement I can use to measure my joy.”
“I feel somehow a person in life, a woman in life. I didn’t think I would feel like other women.”
“You have to continue up to the coming of Jesus.”
“Thanks, thanks, thanks.”
“May God bless and bless and bless and bless.”
“It doesn’t arrive every day to be in this kind of joy. But I am really happy.”
WE’VE DRIVEN FORTY-FIVE MINUTES up the long, winding road that hugs the hillsides above Lake Kivu. With Congolese military hanging around the ramshackle shops at the village crossroads, I emerge from the SUV. Squishy clay mud sucks my flip-flops under.
The women who have been waiting burst into song. The men and children stand back. It’s a women’s party today and they are not invited. Singing and dancing continues during their long procession to the Women for Women compound. The reception today seems almost surreal, the women in saturated colors against the lush landscape dampened with morning rain. Two women lead the group in an impromptu call-and-response chant of endless thanks.
“My kids couldn’t go to school, and now they have education because of you.”
“We were hungry. Now we eat because of you.”
Twenty minutes into the reception, Hortense leans over to me and says, “The woman in yellow is your sister Therese.”
She is a modest woman, perhaps early forties. She wears a traditional African dress, crisp and precisely wrapped, in vivid yellows and purple. I tower above her. (My friends will later laugh at me in the photos. “You look like an Amazon next to her!”)
“Did you ever receive my letter?” I ask, hugging her.
“I got one letter.” She says, “I had already finished the program.”
“Did you get photos?”
“I love them,” she says. “I told my husband you were coming. He wanted to meet you too, but this place is only for women.”
“You said in your letter that your husband had been taken to the bush. Is it the same husband or did you remarry?” I ask.
“I have many, many things to tell you.”
We file into the cement classroom with eight other sisters, whom I greet individually. I kneel down next to a sister in a leopard-print headscarf and a dress with puffy sleeves and shiny embroidery. I look at her booklet.
Beatrice. Her sponsor line reads: Kelly Thomas.
Though it would have been easy to schedule this meeting on a day that fit Kelly’s needs—just a minor coordination via email—her plans prevented her from making it today to meet her own sister. She entrusted me with a letter and photos to pass along to Beatrice. “It’s probably better if you don’t tell her I traveled all this way, but didn’t make it to see her,” she told me.
Why on earth would I want Beatrice to know that?
Gesturing to Beatrice, I tell Hortense,