I have been thinking a lot about wine.

How can I sit at home, enjoying my wine (and all my other creature comforts) while women and girls all over the world endure traumatic experiences that are beyond my comprehension?

Yesterday, February 3, 2010, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed column about Lisa Shannon, called ‘From ‘Oprah’ to Building a Sisterhood in Congo.

An excerpt from the column:

“Five years ago, Lisa Shannon watched “Oprah” and learned about the savage, forgotten war here in eastern Congo, played out in massacres and mass rape.[ ] I found myself stepping with Lisa into a shack here. It was night, there was no electricity, and a tropical rainstorm was turning the shantytown into a field of mud and streams. Lisa had come to visit a woman she calls her sister, Generose Namburho, a 40-year-old nurse.

Generose’s story is numbingly familiar: extremist Hutu militiamen invaded her home one night, killed her husband and prepared to rape her. Then, because she shouted in an attempt to warn her neighbors, they hacked off her leg above the knee with a machete.

As Generose lay bleeding near her husband’s corpse, the soldiers cut up the amputated leg, cooked the pieces on the kitchen fire, and ordered her children to eat their mother’s flesh. One son, a 12-year-old, refused. “If you kill me, kill me,” he told the soldiers, as his mother remembers it. “But I will not eat a part of my mother.”

So they shot him dead.”

Watching ‘Oprah’ compelled Lisa into taking action to help Generose and others, just as reading ‘Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide’ compelled Leigh and I to start WAM Theatre.

Last week, I read ‘Ruined’ by Lynn Nottage one morning before breakfast (I never did manage to have an appetite for breakfast that day) and was reminded of the incredible courage and spirit that exists in so many women and girls.

From the Huntington Theatre’s press release about their upcoming 2011-2012 production of Ruined:

“Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, a gripping and exciting drama, tells the story of Mama Nadi, a savvy Congolese business woman who knows how to survive in the midst of a civil war: don’t take sides. She sells beers and girls to any man who’ll leave his gun at the door. The good-time atmosphere of Mama Nadi’s canteen and her sharp wits can’t always protect her and her girls from the atrocities afflicted on them, but their courage, humor, and hope survive.”

Variety wrote that Nottage “has crafted a work that speaks eloquently of the monstrous acts bred by war, and of the courage and compromises required to survive them.”

From Ben Brantley’s NY Times Theatre Review of the play:

“Patrons are asked to leave their bullets at the bar in the Congolese brothel that is the setting for “Ruined,” the strong and absorbing new play by Lynn Nottage at the Manhattan Theater Club. Mama Nadi (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) runs a cozy little whorehouse — one of the cleanest and safest places in the area — and she’s determined to keep it that way. That means no bullets, no brawling, no unwashed hands and no talk of the civil war being waged in the rain forest outside.

But no matter how vigilant Mama is, evidence of a cruel and bloody conflict keeps trickling in, like isolated raindrops from a storm. It’s not so much the sound of gunfire. Mama and her customers are used to that. It’s what is in the eyes and postures of the women who work for her. Like Sophie (the exquisite Condola Rashad), Mama’s 18-year-old bookkeeper and bar singer, who walks with the stiff, wide-legged gait of someone who feels pain with every step she takes.

But we’re always conscious of how gingerly Sophie carries herself, that the center of her being is her physical pain. That pain is in her restless gaze, which continually roves the bar, but so is the cunning of a born survivor. Ms. Nottage has endowed the frail-looking Sophie, as well as the formidable Mama, with a strength that transforms this tale of ruin into a cleareyed celebration of endurance.”

Celebration of Endurance.

Oppression into Opportunity.

My wine will never taste the same because the savagery experienced by so many women and girls worldwide continues. Every time I read a story or a statistic (girleffect.org has a moving fact sheet, as does the Soroptomost Website) I am reminded that these atrocities exist and that with help, there is a chance for women and girls experiencing unspeakable hardships. Without help, there will never be any celebrations of courage and endurance.

The atrocities are always emotionally overwhelming and that is what stopped me for so long in taking any action. But, reading the stories in ‘Half the Sky’ of women who have turned oppression into opportunity and achieved a ‘clearyed celebration of endurance’ compels me to “do what I can, what what I have, where I am.” (Theodore Roosevelt)

I must do my part to help. For reasons much, much larger than being able to enjoy a glass of wine.

Written by Kristen van Ginhoven, Co-Artistic Director of WAM Theatre. www.kristenvanginhoven.com