coast of Washington State, than the remote jungle of the Democratic Republic of Congo. But whatever the distance—indeed, whatever the differences—the primal African beat had a universal appeal. And a special one for Lilah.
Because the women who sang and danced? They were singing and dancing for her.
It was a gift from the hearts of women who owned almost nothing and had lost so much—husbands and children and homes in the ongoing civil war.
Growing up on an idyllic island, surrounded by fishermen, artists and executive escapees from Seattle, Lilah wouldn’t have been able to imagine that people were capable of such cruelty. After her schoolteacher mother had read her Grimm’s fairy tales, she’d had nightmares for weeks. To this day, she never looked at gingerbread quite the same way.
So when Esther, her good friend among the Congolese women, had told her what had happened to her, her soft voice mingling with the smoke from the kitchen fire in her small hut, Lilah had cringed.
“Lilah, they came one day—this was after they had raided the village and killed my husband and the other men. And taken my oldest son,” Esther had explained. Her tone was flat, but raw emotion cut the sentences into staccato clips. “They were crazy. The militiamen—crazy on drugs. They went from hut to hut. They raped the women, young daughters no more than children, grandmothers—toothless grandmothers. Then they came to me.” Her voice faltered. “They took me, too, in ways not normal. They made sure that my children were watching. It was a game, a sport, n’est-ce pas? When they were done, they laughed. Then they started to talk among themselves. I knew there was more to come. I tried not to show any fear. That was what they wanted of course.”
“You don’t have to say any more,” Lilah remembered telling her friend. She was too old to hide under the covers, but that was what she wished to do. Barring that, she wished she could cover her ears with her hands. But she didn’t. She owed it to Esther to listen, to be brave in any way she could be.
And her friend finished the story, a story so horrific that now, after the fact, Lilah still blotted out the details of how Ester came to lose her leg and what had happened to the rest of the family. What she did recall vividly was her own reaction—crying and reaching out to her friend. Her own words, thinking back now, seemed so self-centered. “I don’t think I would have been able to withstand that. I don’t know if I am strong enough,” she had said.
And Esther had placed her thin hand, as light as a bird’s, on Lilah’s arm and replied, “You do it because you have to. You have to think of tomorrow. There is no choice.”
But for Lilah, there had been a choice. Back in her senior year of college, suffering from the flu, she’d wrapped herself in a quilt on her couch and killed off a dozen boxes of Kleenex, while flipping through the channels on the TV. By chance she landed on this daytime talk show, the sort that she would have never admitted to watching. It carried a heart-wrenching report on the plight of Congolese women.
By the time the program broke away for a commercial for a new women’s deodorant, Lilah had made that choice. She decided to enlist other women to help provide health care to women and children in the remote areas of Congo—places where medical providers were practically unheard of.
And so Sisters for Sisters was born.
It was one thing to find a cause. It was another to carry it out. First had come the efforts to establish a base of operations in the capital of Kinshasa, staffed with a part-time office manager and a nurse who volunteered when she wasn’t working at the hospital. One year later, Lilah got the first traveling clinic up and running. Equipped with medical supplies and a portable lab, that team of two nurses and a female doctor set out to war-torn villages in eastern Congo. After three years, the organization was finally able to pay the nurse in the main office and had added another two clinics, then two more. In total, five traveling clinics were making the rounds—true, often on a shoestring budget and understaffed, but at least they were providing services.
Through her own outreach efforts, Lilah had also coordinated field operations with a group of volunteer doctors, and this partnership helped increase much-needed manpower and opened up Sisters for Sisters to larger funded studies. Now ten years later, her organization had seen both ups and downs—plenty of downs—but she was still unwilling to give up when there were good people like Esther suffering. But there were times when Lilah found it almost impossible to follow Esther’s credo and “think of tomorrow.”
Lilah shook her head. Tomorrow could wait, especially when this moment in time was perfect. Today, Esther was dancing joyfully with a prosthetic leg thanks to Lilah’s efforts.
The music ended. The performers and villagers erupted in a chorus of cheers.
Esther approached Lilah, her gait awkward but confident. She hugged her. “C’est pour toi.” “It’s for you.”
“C’est fantastique!” Lilah exclaimed in French. The language was a vestige of colonialism, but it was still the common language spoken in Congo. “Tu m’as donné un cadeau énorme! Merci bien.” “You’ve given me a wonderful gift. Thank you so much,” she said in her less than fluent French.
“But it is we who are thanking you, ma petite soeur, my little sister,” Esther said. “We are all sisters helping each other, mais non?” She smiled and her voice held a hint of teasing.
That was another of Lilah’s choices—the whole sibling concept.
Her idea for raising money was to hold 5K road races for women where each participant or “sister” sponsored a “sister” in Congo. The idea had taken off. Now her nonprofit organization had more than twenty local affiliates that sponsored fun runs and competitive races almost every month, all across America. Plans were already set to branch out to Europe and Australia.
But while these runs remained the backbone of Sisters for Sisters’s funding and a way for women to “actively” participate in the organization, Lilah recognized the limitations of races as the sole source of revenue. As a result, much of her time was spent writing grant proposals to funding agencies and foundations. This had led to a collaboration with a Doctors Without Borders type of operation to provide cell phones to women in rural villages, thus allowing them to obtain long-distance medical help. Similar programs in other countries, using towers and satellites that the military or World Health Organization had put in place, were already up and running.
Here at last was a way to supplement Sisters for Sisters’s meager staffing. So far only a pilot program in a few locales, including Esther’s village, had been funded, and if they were going to expand, they’d need more money. Lilah figured she’d have to give up on sleep altogether to get out more grant applications.
As if that weren’t enough to worry about, after a race two months ago in Poughkeepsie, New York, a woman had approached her who was a senior VP at a large investment house. She wanted to help set up a local banking system so that women could establish savings accounts to better the lives of their children.
Lilah felt overwhelmed. What did she know about banking? Microfinancing sounded like a good idea, but was it something Sisters for Sisters should be affiliated with? They always had been associated strictly with medical care. On the other hand, if she said no, would she be turning down an opportunity too good to miss? After all, the link between improved standards of health and financial well-being, not to mention better education, was well documented.
But all these questions would simply have to wait. Now she reveled in the warmth radiating from Esther’s skin as Lilah embraced her “sister.” A late-afternoon shower started to fall, heightening the smells of the village and the jungle.
Esther broke away from their hug and looked to the skies. “It’s time for the feast. It is good we have the school to keep us dry.” That was something of an exaggeration. Made of sticks, the school consisted of a thatched roof and dirt floor.
Esther clapped for her three remaining children to come, and with her head held high she clumped along on her artificial leg. She nodded for Lilah to follow.
Lilah joined