A Thousand Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

ideas are to send out a bulk email and to invite ten friends over for a screening of Oprah’s Congo segment. One of my best friends, Lana—a savvy Portland casting director known for her fundraising prowess—advises otherwise. “Don’t invite ten friends over to your place. Ask those ten friends to each invite ten friends to their houses.”
    I don’t have ten friends to ask, but six friends finally agree to it. I squirm at the prospect of asking people for money, so I keep it simple and take a no-pressure approach. I give a little talk, show the Oprah video clip, and ask people to sponsor a woman in Congo, pledge a flat donation, or just read more about the conflict.
    Another friend asks me, “What’s the hardest part? I bet it’s not the running.” She is right: It’s feeling alone. When I talk about Congo, it’s not just that people don’t know about the war, it’s that they assume there must be a reason no one is talking or doing anything about it. When I invite a thoughtful, politically aware friend out for coffee and try to convince her to host a house party, she questions the logic of my effort. “Why help women there, where it’s a total mess? Why not help other needy women someplace where it is stable?”
    I’m glad I’m wearing sunglasses because I’m so frustrated I choke up. I know my emotional argument won’t get me very far, but it’s all I’ve got. “Because they don’t feel like human beings.”
    This friend hosts a house party after all, where we raise eight sponsorships!
    I try to read more, but news on Congo is shockingly spare.
    There is one book I devour: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost , a haunting account of Congo’s colonial history. In the late nineteenth century,
with the help of the adventure-crazed Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley, Belgium’s King Leopold staked out the Congo Free State as his own private colony . Under the auspices of science, religious conversion, and protection from Arab slave traders and from their own ignorance, he enslaved the Congolese people en masse to extract Congo’s treasure trove of natural resources, from rubber to ivory. Leopold used his plunder to build pleasure palaces on the French Riviera and bankroll the Paris shopping sprees of his teenage mistress, who once boasted of spending three million francs at one dress shop. During King Leopold’s thirty-year rule, the population of Congo was cut in half, with a staggering net loss of ten million people. Novelist Joseph Conrad labeled it “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.”
    Yet in a strange and inspiring turn, the first major international human rights movement was launched against Leopold’s oppressive regime by a modest English shipping clerk with no greater credential or connection to Congo than having read the subtext of the shipping records. Endless shipments of rubber and other natural resources were being imported from Congo, while only guns and soldiers were being exported back. That could only mean one thing, he guessed: slavery. Armed with the evidence, E. D. Morel recruited citizens and dignitaries from around the world and led the charge to end Leopold’s brutal treatment of native people. His campaign led to the handover of the Congo Free State from King Leopold to the government of Belgium in 1908. It remained a colony until 1960, when it was granted independence.
    E. D. Morel’s story is a shot of pure inspiration, especially because I’ve been combing the Internet, searching for any other grassroots folks working for Congo. While the movement to end the violence in Darfur has gained momentum by mobilizing religious groups, students, moms, movie stars, journalists, and big news organizations, as far as I can see, the field for helping the people of Congo is painfully empty .

    AT THE END of my