by Jo Piazza
A man on a surfboard kept paddling next to Sister Madonna after the swim turnaround, yelling instructions, but as she neared the pier, she felt like she was swimming in place. The scenery below her never changed. As a result, she was four minutes shy of the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute cutoff, which prevented her from taking off on the bike. Her first Ironman was doomed. Had the cutoff been the usual two hours and twenty minutes, as it is today, she would have made it.
“Yet I was so close, I just kept thinking to myself that I had to do it again. Nothing is impossible with God,” she said.
The next year, 1986, she completed the race in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, despite stopping during the running portion to help a dehydrated woman and walking with her until an ambulance came.
Since then, Sister Madonna has competed in one or two Ironman competitions a year, in addition to a handful of half Ironman distances, triathlons of other lengths, and running events including marathons. Sister Madonna’s best-ever Ironman time came at age sixty-two, when she finished in thirteen hours and sixteen minutes.
She giggles when people ask her how she trains.
“I don’t. I really don’t. I like to tell them I just keep moving all the time. I run to church when I can. I literally run errands,” Sister Madonna said. “I watch for chances to bike outdoors whenever I can. I really don’t enjoy using mechanical devices indoors.”
She doesn’t have a coach, at least not in the physical sense of the word.
“My coach is the Man Upstairs,” she says. “He gave me a body to listen to. I don’t need any contraptions to listen to my body. It speaks out loud enough.”
She actually takes the shortest route possible in her runs from the small mobile home she lives in all by herself to Mass at St. Anthony’s Church in Spokane, Washington, most days, making the round trip of just under five miles in long pants that are suitably conservative for a Catholic Mass. She rides or runs almost everywhere, some days doing a mini-triathlon just to get around, which requires squeezing in a mile-plus swim as well. She lives by the sun’s cycle, going to bed when it is dark, waking up when it is light, never setting an alarm. She eats what is available, mostly carbohydrates and fresh vegetables and fruits. She grows what she can in a small garden and occasionally indulges in her weakness for chocolate-chip cookies. In the summer she laps up ice cream almost every single day.
“You can’t give up ice cream,” she told me. “I have done nothing knowledgeable to pollute my body, but alcohol and caffeine are acceptable for enjoyment’s sake.”
Her roughshod training regimen employs the following guidelines: don’t waste time training when you can incorporate it into your daily routine, thus making workouts a part of your daily lifestyle; try to make it as joyful as possible to avoid burnout; vary your routine to avoid boredom. Training indoors gives her no joy, as she told me, so she rarely does it, unless inclement weather gives her no choice.
When the cold comes to Spokane, the kind of damp cold that nestles in and camps out in your bones for four months, she hardly trains at all.
“I dislike sitting on a piece of training equipment watching those digital numbers turn around. It’s always so hard to see the warmth and sun go,” she lamented when I spoke to her over the phone on the first truly cold day in Washington. Sister Madonna has a difficult time saying anything negative about nature, so she is quick to tack on an addendum: “But if I didn’t have the change of seasons, I wouldn’t be able to hibernate like God’s lesser creatures.”
It has been tricky to set up phone calls with Sister Madonna, as technology is peripheral to her life. She has neither cell phone nor computer, but she knows every spot in town that has Internet access. When she needs to use the Internet, she will bike or run to those locations. Whenever we arranged for a phone conversation, we had to pack in as much talking as possible or I would miss her for another week.
During one of our talks, we got on the topic of her motivation. She is adamant that she races on God’s command. When she wants to drag her heels, He pushes her forward. She races for those who seem inspired by what she does.
“They want to see this age group expanding and expanding,” she said. “I don’t understand why I mean so much to them, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to understand. If they want or need a carrot on a string, I am willing to be that for them.”
She takes issue with those who might criticize her. “Who says I can’t be in the Church and doing God’s work everywhere I go?” she has said. “There is no limit, no boundaries, to when and where you can commune with God. It doesn’t have to be in church all the time. It’s not me. It’s about what God does in and through us.”
Neglecting her talents would actually be an insult to God, she tells me. “If He gives you a talent, He expects you to use it. Not to do it would just insult His generosity.”
When Sister Madonna was in her fifties, she was the only fifty-year-old woman doing marathons. Then that division began to slowly fill up. She has opened five age group divisions for women since then: 60–64, 65–69, 70–74, 75–79, and then 80-plus. So far, she is her only competition in her age group.
“I am racing against time,” she says. “But I am also outliving the competition. It would be awfully nice to open up the race for women in their nineties.”
5.
An Underground Railroad for Modern-Day Slaves
To say a person has been trafficked is to say they have
had their freedom taken away from them through force, fraud,
or coercion. They are treated like a commodity, not a person, and
their humanity is stripped away from them.
—Sister Joan Dawber
What had I done?
I covered my eyes with my hands and splayed them apart just an inch to see a nineteen-year-old Asian woman on the movie screen in front of me handcuffed and whipped by a dominatrix while her pimp looked on menacingly, smoking crystal meth out of a dirty pipe.
Sitting next to me was an unfailingly proper British nun in her sixties, my guest at this film premiere of a movie called Eden, which tells the story of a Korean American girl sold into sex slavery.
With each increasingly sexualized scene (a male sexual organ is bitten off in the middle of the film), I became more convinced that I’d made the same kind of mistake I had made when I watched Brokeback Mountain with my conservative father.
“We can leave,” I whispered during a particularly disturbing scene.
Sister Joan Dawber just shook her head a little.
“I may close my eyes if this gets to be too bad,” she replied, as calm as ever. I was the one shielding my face for most of the movie.
I was surprised when Sister Joan took me up on my offer to see Eden. I forwarded her the invite only moments after it arrived in my inbox, not really expecting a response, just thinking it could be the kind of thing she would be interested in, wanting to be friendly. I had actually forgotten that I had even sent it until she wrote back to me three days later:
Thanks for this very kind invitation, Jo. Yes, I am planning to join you, however, I have a meeting from 5:15–6:15 in Queens then I will drive into the city. Let me know where we should meet. Thanks.
She was waiting for me when I arrived and wrapped me in a warm hug in front of the Film Forum on a dimly lit block of West Houston Street in Manhattan, about thirteen miles from her home in Queens.
“I can’t believe I drove in here so late, look at me!” she said, spreading her arms wide and looking up at the slightly shabby neon-blue marquee. “So this is where the artsy people all hang out.” Sure enough, a group of black-turtle-necked, dark-rimmed-glasses-wearing hipsters elbowed past us through the glass doors, knocking Sister Joan into me. She just laughed and grabbed my arm as we walked into the theater.
Thirty minutes later, I was nervously checking that Sister Joan was all right. I didn’t n
eed to be nervous. As the executive director of the LifeWay Network, running one of only three safe houses in New York City for women survivors of human trafficking, she hears stories worse than the ones portrayed in Eden every single day.
She has a dangerous job.
The location of the house is kept secret from everyone but a select few other nuns and volunteers who help Sister Joan with the house operations. If its location were made known, the lives of the sisters who run it and the women they are trying to protect would be in jeopardy. The majority of the people, mostly men, who traffic the women are still at large, and Sister Joan is essentially stealing from their bank accounts by harboring their chattel.
In nun circles, word of mouth travels fast, so I had heard stories about Sister Joan well before I met her. One afternoon, I was taking the Staten Island Ferry with Sister Simone Campbell and the rest of the “Nuns on the Bus.” As the crowd of sisters, most with short gray hair and sensible wash-and-wear outfits, power-walked their way commandingly through Whitehall Station to board the boat across the New York Harbor, I explained this book project to them.
“It’s about how badass nuns are. You know, all of the great work you guys all do,” I explained, giving my elevator pitch. They began buzzing among themselves, many of them having the same thought at the same time.
“You have to meet Joan Dawber,” one sister with a particularly gravelly voice told me. “She rescues sex slaves . . . has a safe house for them.” Soon everyone within earshot agreed that I had to meet her, and I was provided with three different ways in which to contact her. That is how things with nuns usually happen. They are quick to come to a consensus and convince you their consensus is the exact course of action needed in order to find an elegant solution to a problem. If nuns ran the world, things would just get done. No questions asked.
I set about convincing Sister Joan to meet with me. After months of e-mailing with Arlene, Sister Joan’s watchdog of an administrative assistant, we met for the first time just a couple of weeks before going to see Eden. In person, Sister Joan is the last woman you would expect to be running a dangerous modern-day Underground Railroad. Her voice has a melodic singsong like Julie Andrews’s Maria in The Sound of Music, which can immediately put anyone at ease. She is slight and quick in movement. Her face is unlined and quite beautiful. She wore a heather-gray cardigan, nearly the same color as her short but stylish hair that just brushed her earlobes, the sweater drowning her birdlike wrists. New York City had been overwhelmed with a small blizzard that week and I arrived on her doorstep in Forest Hills, Queens, covered in ice and snow, my socks soaked through to my feet and makeup dripping down my face.
“Oh, I didn’t think you would actually make it here,” Sister Joan fussed as she let me in the door. I had expected someone bigger, maybe burlier, someone who could take down the kinds of men who hold women in captivity. I marveled at little Sister Joan.
She busied herself with taking my coat and scarf and getting me settled into a chair next to her desk so she could tell me her story.
Back in 2001, a group of six hundred female congregation leaders from around the world, known as the Union of Superiors General, met in Rome for a conference to discuss the issues they believed nuns should be tackling in the twenty-first century. One contingent of sisters from Africa was very vocal about the need for sisters to address the growing global problem of human trafficking.
That inspired the congregational leader of Sister Joan’s order to send out a letter asking her sisters to take a closer look at the issue. When Sister Joan took it to heart, her Mother Superior joked that Sister Joan was the only one who ever bothered to read her letter.
“When I read about it, I felt squeamish,” Sister Joan said. “It was a world I didn’t want to get to know.” She didn’t want to fall down the rabbit hole of something so “wounded and violent and stripped of hope.” But she felt called to pray on it.
“I didn’t even want to look at it because it was too upsetting,” she said. “I thought I would just pray about it . . . but of course, when we pray, it isn’t the other people who are changed, it is us who get changed, and as I prayed I got stronger. I knew there was a desire in me to assist. I can’t explain it any better than to just say that it became clear to me. I had a sense that I could make a difference.”
In 2005, at a conference on human trafficking in Baltimore run by the Migration and Refugee Services branch of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Sister Joan found a group of like-minded religious folks who wanted to tackle the issue with her. It was God’s divine providence that had brought them all together in the same place, she told me. The seven sisters at the conference hailed from five different congregations in New York. During their meeting they decided to form a coalition and met later that year at the motherhouse for the Sisters of Charity of New York on September 28, 2005. Sister Mary Heyser, RSHM, chaired the meeting and became the glue for the group that would be known as NY-CRC-STOP: New York Coalition of Religious Congregations to Stop Trafficking of People.
Human trafficking is defined by the US State Department as “activities involved when one person obtains or holds another person in compelled service.” International, national, and state laws provide varying definitions, typically emphasizing the exploitation of another human being. To Sister Joan, human trafficking is no less than modern-day slavery.
“If you think about how individuals were taken against their will, used as commodities, and sold as commodities, that is what is happening today in the experience of human trafficking. Individuals are tricked through all kinds of ploys. Unlike slavery in the past, it isn’t along racial lines. It is among the vulnerable population.”
After those first meetings with like-minded religious folks, Sister Joan racked her brain thinking about how she could provide something of actual value to the victims.
The key, she believed, was safe housing. These women couldn’t do anything until they had a safe place to live. She asked her order if she could give up her full-time work in parish ministry to work on the trafficking issue on a more regular basis. When they agreed, she started her research full-time.
“Joan and I tried to visit places with safe houses so we could get a feel for the setup and meet women who were living there,” Sister Mary Heyser explained.
Like a holier version of Thelma and Louise, the pair hit the road together, traveling across the country to California to see one of the only safe houses in America specifically designated for the safe housing of women. There, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking welcomed the sisters and gave them a tour of their grounds.
“We were actually really honored to be able to do that. They didn’t do that for other people,” Sister Joan said.
Standing in the garden after they’d walked through the house and met the women staying there, Sister Joan met Sister Mary’s gaze. Both women knew there was no turning back.
“I said, ‘Mary, we are really going to do this,’” Sister Joan recalled to me, mustering that same fresh determination and sitting up straighter in her chair.
“That was when I had this gut sense that I was truly doing what I was meant to be doing,” she said. “A feeling inside me just confirmed that.”
Her work began in a small room with nothing but a computer.
With seed money from her congregation, Sister Joan officially created LifeWay Network, a nonprofit that would provide housing for victims of trafficking and education about the reality of human trafficking, in 2007. LifeWay’s first challenge was finding an actual house for the survivors, one that they would be able to keep a secret. At first, Sister Joan tried to leverage one of the many houses owned by different religious communities across the city. Most of them had plenty of rooms to spare, given the aging population of their communities. Nearly all of the orders Sister Joan contacted were willing to offer hospitality to the women on a temporary basis, keeping them safe
for a night or two in the very early days after they broke free from their captors. Before long, LifeWay had five convents working with them to provide an Underground Railroad for emergency housing. Soon after, Sister Joan secured a single house that would provide more permanent housing, where women could spend up to a year in order to get on their feet.
“It was kept very quiet,” Sister Joan said. “We didn’t want people to know what we were doing. The word ‘trust’ is very important when we speak about victims of human trafficking because it has totally been eradicated and violated for these women. I think the greatest need is the safety; before you have that safety factor, nothing else seems to make sense. They aren’t comfortable to try anything else.”
Trafficking survivors hide in plain sight. The signs of slavery are vague. “They can include a person who is afraid, doesn’t speak the language, has someone else speak for them, a person maybe who has moved several times,” Sister Joan explained to me. “Maybe there is no eye contact, signs of bruising. You may think that your maid in your room or your waiter or the woman at the massage parlor all have legit jobs, but in some cases that isn’t true. To identify victims of human trafficking is a difficult thing.”
Today, LifeWay partners with social-service organizations like Safe Horizons and New York Asian Women’s Center to reach out to survivors. When there is a raid or a person is found by law enforcement, officials contact Sister Joan to see if the survivor can live in her safe house.
Staffed by three nuns, a house manager who lives there full-time, and a part-time social worker, the house feels very different from the sterility of a shelter.
“It is a strong sense of community being with the women, rather than it being a boardinghouse kind of thing,” Sister Joan explained. “There is somebody at the end of the day who wants to know how you are doing, is everything OK, what was your day like . . . without being intrusive and asking questions about their trafficking situation.”