Burness Global: Stories

At a conference in Nairobi that focused on how more trees on farms could help reverse climate change, Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai had a story to tell. It was about a fire that broke out in a huge forest.

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At the start of the story-telling festival at L’Alliance Française, a cultural center in the heart of Nairobi, the host imposed a condition on the audience: we must promise to share the stories we hear. “Deal?” he asked. “Deal” we answered. “Sawa sawa,” he said, and the storytelling began, the first from Kenya.

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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.

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MUMIAS, Kenya — Margaret Musambi is one of those rare people who likes to expand her job responsibilities to have a greater impact on people’s lives. She is an extension agent for Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, based here in the western part of the country.
Musambi’s passion in the last few years has been to teach [...]

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Kenyan businessmen and women, and political friends of the new power-sharing coalition government, filled the large ballroom of Nairobi’s Grand Regency Hotel. Reporters and camera crews bustled about, fighting over position. Black, gold, and brown drapes adorned the edges of the room, along with signs and banners of organizations taking part in the announcement.
This was [...]

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But the impacts linger, just out of view. This morning, I was interviewing Machira Gichohi, managing director of the Kenya Dairy Board, and he brought up how the violence affected the dairy industry.

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