Burness Global: Stories

Wangari Maathai, 20 years ago (credit: Ellen Wilson)

“The earth was naked. For me, the mission was to try to cover it with green.”– Wangari Maathai

It is a day like any other, running around Washington, D.C., in a Honda Odyssey, taking children through their errands. This is the suburban life in the US: there’s a birthday party and a gift that needs to be bought. We drive to the toy store to get a Batman action figure for Tristram, and I hope my 6-year-old will not scream and cry about not having any of his own money left to get a toy. In the window, I glimpse a book that immediately takes me back years, to my days of trekking in the uplands north of Nairobi and down into the Rift Valley with four Green Belt Movement members. We went village to village to speak to women about planting trees across their treeless lands.

In Wangari’s Trees of Peace, this woman of inspiration and the movement she created has been memorialized in the form of a children’s book. It is a strange vision, and I wonder how an oversimplified story about Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai has been crafted to be sold to children who are also being sold plastic Legos and Playmobil sets and computer games and books on Star Wars and race cars and Barbie and Groovy Girls and Calico Critters.

Book Cover

I buy the book to read it to my children. I buy it for myself as well. Its last lines say,

“And if you were to climb to the very top of Mount Kenya today, you would see the millions of trees growing below you, and the green Wangari brought back to Africa.”

I saw those green trees. We traveled by public taxi minibuses called matatus and walked for miles and miles on foot, probably stopping in many villages. In every village, we were greeted by women singing and dancing. In every village, Lilian Njehu, an early leader of the movement, spoke to the women for hours and hours about their trees. Sitting on bare benches in the sun under scarce trees for shade, she helped them tend to their trees, speaking in Kikuyu. We saw thousands of seedlings grown in rows in each place and others that had grown to be mature trees—trees for firewood, windbreaks, food, and medicine.

I read the book to my sons that night. They listened intently. When we were through, they asked why Wangari was arrested for trying to protect a park in the middle of Nairobi, for stirring up conflict by training women all across the land to plant trees. “Was she really in jail?” they asked. A few days later, I helped my youngest son plant a bean seedling he had nourished from a seed to life in our kitchen window.  He felt the dirt around the roots, the coolness of the soil in his hands, the feeling of laying to bed a green thing that will grow tall out of dirt—something that will produce the nurturing sustenance of life. It brought me back years again, and I understood anew how millions of nurturing women’s hands in Kenya, and in other countries, brought life out of the land and how their joy and their singing could bring life and peace back to the land.

Bean Seedling (credit: Ellen Wilson)