Raising awareness

Lisa Ling spent an uneasy night in Uganda recently. The country shuts down its electricity at 11 p.m. and, as it plunges into darkness, the Lord’s Resistance Army roams into villages to kidnap children. But late last month, Ling’s risk paid off when her story on the crisis aired on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and viewers responded in droves. Across the country, Americans participated in a night walk to bring awareness to the plight of the children of Uganda.

On Monday, Ling will appear at the 14th annual Women Helping Women luncheon at the Spokane Convention Center to help raise funds for poor and disadvantaged women and children living right here.

“When you travel all around the world and you see the egregious injustices that are directed toward women, it’s really a wake-up call,” Ling says in an interview over her cell phone as she drives through Los Angeles. “The way I see it, if women don’t help each other, no one else will.”

That’s exactly the way Spokane’s Women Helping Women Fund sees it, too. In fact, those words have practically been the organization’s mantra for the last 13 years. During that time, it’s raised more than $2.7 million to help local women and children.

This year organizers expect an audience of approximately 2,000 people at the luncheon, who are required to donate at least $100, and they hope to raise more than $200,000. Last year’s luncheon raised $235,000.

The audience will include a group of Spokane mothers who have adopted babies from China. They plan to bring their copies of a DVD that Ling hosted, National Geographic’s “China’s Lost Girls,” and ask for her autograph.

Ling wasn’t the first choice for this year’s luncheon – NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was – but she brings a message that easily matches the organization’s mission.

“I think she’s one of the hottest names out there right now, and I think we’re really lucky to have been able to find her and have her book with us,” says Kathleen Kozlowski, president of the Women Helping Women Fund.

“Who knows how it would have come out had (Andrea Mitchell) been speaking this Monday, but I couldn’t be more thrilled with Lisa Ling.”

The switch was announced in late March after Mitchell discovered she’d need to honor her contract with NBC and attend a state dinner that night, Kozlowski says.

“She was called into a White House state dinner that same day, and we kind of got put on the back burner,” Kozlowski says. “She’s got to honor her contract with her employer as well.”

Ling, 32, serves as a correspondent for National Geographic Channel and a special contributor for “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” She formerly appeared on “The View” with Barbara Walters.

She logs endless air miles. The last couple of months have been particularly hectic.

“I’ve been kind of traveling like a crazy person,” she says.

But she’s worked out a way to schedule her various trips: “If I’m working on a story in India, for example, for National Geographic, I’ll let the Oprah folks know and there might be a story we can dovetail either in India or another part of Asia,” she says.

Ling started working in television at age 16 and by 21, she was flying to Afghanistan.

“Once you’re exposed to these stories in the world, it’s hard to turn your back on them,” she says.

She’s proud of the work she does.

“It would be very easy for me to do entertainment or do softer news. … There are enough people doing that stuff,” Ling says. “There aren’t enough people in my opinion who are doing stories that no one else is telling. Thank God for Oprah and National Geographic, these organizations that are allowing me to do it.”

On one “Oprah” show, Ling covered a story about women in the Congo who were gang-raped by soldiers while their children were forced to watch.

“In one episode of television,” she says, “we raised $2.5 million. By the second time it aired, the repeat, we’d raised about $4 million.”

Her report from Uganda was paired with a piece from about genocide in Sudan by George Clooney. Both served to startle “Oprah” viewers.

“The response has been of utter shock and dismay,” Ling says, “which is how I reacted after I experienced the story.”

In Uganda children walk up to two hours each night to escape the rebel army. They sleep in cages protected by the Ugandan government and non-governmental organizations, and then they return to their villages the next morning to work the fields.

“I had read about the Lord’s Resistance Army before,” Ling says, “but until I saw those thousands and thousands of kids walking up to five miles a day in Uganda before my own eyes, I would never have conceived of something like this happening.”

Women Helping Women similarly raises awareness about the plight of women and children in Spokane who lack money or health or emotional care.

Each year the organization selects a group of social service programs to support with the proceeds of its event. It has chosen 15 this year, including the Healthy Parenting program at Alexandria House, run by Volunteers of America.

“Now imagine that you’re a homeless teen on the streets of Spokane, and you end up getting pregnant,” Kozlowski says. “In my estimation, that would be a pretty tough situation for anyone to handle.”

The program shelters homeless teen moms and their babies, providing a safe harbor and parenting skills they may not have received from their own parents.

Kozlowski toured the facility for Women Helping Women. “I was just really impressed with their caring approach to everything they do,” she says.

Similarly, she’s impressed by the courageous young woman who will be flying to Spokane to speak on Monday.

So how did Ling sleep through that dark, difficult night in Uganda?

“Thank goodness for Ambien,” she says.