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long . Despite her unmeasured approach and regular fits of panic (the organizational tasks are tough on her nerves), we’re pulling it off.
    Over the year since my Wildwood Trail run, Run for Congo Women events have sprung up in ten states and four countries. Some are simple solo runs, some are community or group runs. Tracey, in suburban Texas, has trained all summer in 110-degree heat. Robin, a mom in North Carolina, runs with her son. Carrie, in Ireland, takes out a permit at a manor house and more than forty people join her on a run around the grounds. My friends in London are reaching out to their church to sponsor their walk. More than a hundred people showed up for the Second Annual Portland Run for Congo Women.
    With all the interest, I decided to take the run on the road. I took out permits in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., hoping to spark a movement.
    We have more than forty registrations for the First Annual New York Run for Congo Women. With this morning’s rainy weather, I’m not optimistic about the turnout. We’ve already gotten several emails asking if we’re still on.
    Yes, we’re still on. When it rains in Congo, women still hide in the bushes from the militia. They sleep in the rain. Kids get sick and die. We’re running today. No excuses, no deterrents.
    My mom takes temporary refuge in a coffee shop a couple of blocks away from the start line, while I hold down the fort in my skimpy running clothes and Mom’s oversize, ankle-length trench coat. It whips and snaps against my blotchy, red, goose-bumped legs.
    Alone, sick of my own spin, I abandon the internal pep talk. I squint to keep the wind and rain from thrashing at my eyes. The driving rain stings, drops pelt me like needles. It’s so cold that I have to concentrate just to hold still and control the reflexive shaking. The banner blows off. I climb up the
retaining wall and bury myself in the tree branches to re-tie it with my icy fingers. I find no comfort or inspiration from the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt looming over me as the dimness of nighttime lifts bit by bit. The rain continues unabated. I decide that this moment is officially harder than mile twenty-nine. There will be no break from the cold for hours.
    At eight o’clock, our start time, it’s just me and my mom. A cab pulls up and all the country directors from Women for Women emerge. I just met Christine, the organization’s country director for Congo, in Chicago a few weeks ago. She is a vibrant, open, regal Congolese woman . We are both thirty-one years old and five foot ten, so she instantly branded me her “twin sister.”
    One runner with cropped blond hair shows up in a pink jogging suit. She introduces herself as Lisa Jackson. We wait another twenty minutes in the rain, just in case. Finally, we run the five-mile there-and-back course in the atrocious weather. We finish and escape to a local diner, where Lisa hands me a promotional postcard for her documentary-in-progress, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.
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    ASIDE FROM LISA JACKSON, I’ve come across only a few other grassroots Congo activists: The Washington, D.C.-based Friends of Congo, who join me in organizing the first D.C. Run for Congo Women; a six-person-strong Chicago-based coalition, headed by a Presbyterian couple; and a woman in California who collects tea bags and combs to send to rape victims at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. Collectively, we seem to be the movement for Congo.
    But I receive an email from another potential activist who lives in a town nearby. She is a Women for Women sponsor who also saw the Congo report on Oprah . Its subject line: I WANT TO DO MORE. Anxious to foster leadership in what I hope is growing into a movement, I hop in the car and make the three-hour drive to help Kelly engage her church in a Hike for Congo Women project . An ultraorganized, sweet-spoken former model and a devout Christian, she is