Wangari Maathai, Ellen Wilson, media in Kenya (credit: Jeff Haskins)

The Dr. Maathai-inspired Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign planted 4 billion trees as of yesterday. It started in 2007.

At a conference in Nairobi that focused on how more trees on farms could help reverse climate change, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai had a story to tell.

It was about a fire that broke out in a huge forest.

“All of the animals are coming out of the forest very disheartened,” she said. “They were saying, ‘Let me leave, as there is nothing we can do.’ They came to the edge of the forest—all except the hummingbird.

“The hummingbird said, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I want to do something about this fire.’ The hummingbird went to a spring and brought back a drop of water and put it on the fire. The bird kept going back and forth putting a drop of water on the fire. All of the other animals stayed on the edge of the forest—even those with larger beaks which could bring more water. They said, ‘What are you doing? You are too little. Come and join us.’ The hummingbird kept going.”

Maathai said that when it comes to growing trees on farms and reforesting in Kenya, every citizen has a role to play. For example, she said, farmers should “not wait for the government” to dig trenches to allow water to sink into the ground rather than run off and strip away the top soil. They should harvest rain water on their land, she said. People should plant trees from large canopied trees to small shrubs.

“Every one of us can be a hummingbird,” she said.

Ostrich in Kenya (credit: Julian Mason, cc license)

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.

The storyteller was a tall anglo woman, her British accent rounded with African inflections.  She had a neck like a Maasai, long and regal, and cropped white hair.  She began, and she was the hunter.  Three drummers and a flautist seated on the stage articulated the story with beats, rattles, and high flowing notes:

This hunter held a spear as he searched the savannah for an ostrich.  The ostrich he found did not run, but rose, leaving him a single egg, which he wrapped in a blanket and took home.  He placed it in a pot, whose bottom was lined with a thin layer of fat.  The egg grew in size, the fat disappeared, the man added more fat, the egg grew larger.  The hunter transferred it to another pot, and the egg grew until one day it cracked, and from it emerged a baby girl.

The man and his wife were childless and they raised the girl.  She became the hunter’s pride and joy.  The girl could run almost as fast as a cheetah, and dance graceful intricate dances, and leap like a leopard.  So enamored was the father of his daughter that he ordered his wife to let the girl do as she liked.  Left to her own devices, the hunter believed his daughter would find a path to greatness.  The wife could get no help from their daughter -no help to gather firewood or water, to plant and weed and harvest the crops, or cook the food.  And the woman realized that her husband loved their daughter, more than he loved her.

The storyteller addressed the audience: “What does a woman feel like,” she asked, “when she thinks her husband loves someone else more than he loves her?” The man sitting next to me answered “She feels smashed.”  “She feels like smacking herself,” someone else in the audience offered.  The storyteller continued:

Year after year, jealousy grew in the wife’s chest.  It grew from a small dark seed, until it consumed her being.  Then, one day as she was cooking porridge, the wife found that the porridge was hardening in the pot.  She needed water.  She could not leave the pot for the porridge would spoil.  And so she called her daughter to go and fetch some water:

Now, the storyteller became the daughter and the lead drummer became the mother.  They spoke in the local language. The mother/drummer called for help.  The daughter/storyteller turned her back and admired her fingernails.  The mother demanded help. The daughter scoffed.

“You are nothing but an egg,” the drummer/mother yelled. (The man sitting next to me translated.) “What, me, an egg?”  “You are an egg, an ostrich egg, deserted in the grass!” The mother/drummer bellowed.

The girl could not stand to hear those words, she tore out of the house.  The hunter saw her run, and at once knew what had happened.  He pursued his daughter, across the savannah, past the trees dotting the grassland, toward the river.  He had almost reached her, when she jumped into the river and began to swim, stroke after stroke, across the river.  He wanted to pursue her, but something stayed him.  He froze there on the river bank.  As she emerged on the other side, her legs, her strong and beautiful legs, were changing, the thighs thickening.  Her neck, her long and elegant neck, grew longer still, her head grew smaller, and feathers sprouted from her chest and back, until, she stood there, an ostrich.  The ostrich turned and looked at the hunter.  For one moment, their eyes locked.  And then she turned and galloped across the savannah, almost as fleet as a cheetah, never to be seen again.

The audience was silent.  The school girls in their green sweaters and black skirts, the ex-pats and their children, the orphans from a nearby home, and the story-tellers in queue, preparing to speak.

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)

Margaret Musambi (credit: Dominic Chavez)

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 farmers the multiple uses of soybeans, emphasizing their nutritional benefits. She has shown farmers how to make soy milk, soy yogurt, soy cakes, soy sausages, even soy meatballs.

“Soy is wonderful,” she said one day recently, sitting with a group of farmers.

But one of her more creative projects has been to introduce soy to a group of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In Mumias, a town of about 30,000 people, she has begun to work with 50 members belonging to an HIV/AIDS support group.

Helped by a small grant from the US Agency for International Development, the group purchased 50-kilogram bags of soybeans. She told the group members, most of whom are taking anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS, that they should incorporate more soy into their diets. She also taught them how to make soy products, which the members now sell in local markets.

“These people are becoming so healthy,” Musambi said. “Their drugs are helping them, and the soybeans are as well. It’s true. You eat soy and it will cheer you up.”

President Kibaki

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 the launch of the first major national partnership to provide small-scale Kenyan farmers with $50 million USD in low-interest loans. But the excitement in the room was over something else: the attendance of President Mwai Kibaki and the new Prime Minister Raila Odinga. The two leaders were attending the event as a show of unity and commitment to the country and its farmers–the backbone of the Kenyan economy.

Everyone in the room was in support of this program for farmers, but what people were really waiting to see was the interaction between Kibaki and Odinga, following the violent outcome of the December 2007 elections. The two men had run against each other for president, and the disputed results led to weeks of turmoil that killed more than 1,100 people and laid bare the country’s deep divisions.

Loud “presidential” music blared through the public announcement system, announcing the arrival of both men and their entourages, followed by an elaborate musical program with songs and dances for the royal audience. Then Odinga took the podium first.

“You could say I was ambushed,’’ he said.

I wondered where he was going with this.

“I was not prepared to make remarks here today,’’ he said.

Phew, I thought, a lighthearted opening joke. The crowd laughed. You could tell they took to him.

“A nation that can feed its own people is a better nation. A hungry person is an angry person; we want to deal with the hunger so as to be able to comprehensively deal with the anger,” Odinga said.

This was more of what I was expecting.

The Prime Minister described the age-old adage that if you teach a man how to fish, he can sustain himself. He said giving handouts to farmers is the same as giving them a fish–as opposed to teaching them. “Farmers don’t want handouts! They need sustainable solutions. That’s why this program is important!” he railed.

Odinga then gave a gracious introduction for Kibaki.

As they passed each other on the stage, they nodded at each other and almost smiled. There seemed to be some positive chemistry. I compared this to what I see on the front pages of Kenyan newspapers on a daily basis: static pictures of two men in their dark suits. The newspapers made them always seem at odds. This scene on stage surprised me; I wasn’t prepared for a friendly exchange, but then again I shouldn’t have expected a showdown either.

Kibaki described the perfect storm of factors contributing to the current food crisis including oil process and climate change. He also spoke of the 3.5 million bags of maize destroyed during the post-election violence.

“I appeal to all concerned, give peace a chance,” he said. “We need to forget what happened…and move forward together.”

There was an awkward silence in the room.

Kibaki continued: “I declare Kilimo Biashara partnership officially landed. We have come together, thank you for this effort,” Kibaki said.

That was it. No one was going to be against a loan program for farmers, especially now at a time of rising food prices. But here in Kenya, and elsewhere, so much depends on whether the government can effectively implement programs. I was happy to see the positive chemistry between the two leaders in person, and now Kenyan farmers wait to see if they deliver.

Kenya Cows (credit: Dominic Chavez)

NAIROBI – The pace of life here is as it always has been–lots of traffic jams, crowded downtown sidewalks, tens of thousands of people selling things by the roadside. Tourists also have returned in high numbers this summer. It is easy to forget that just seven months ago the waves of post-election violence raised serious questions about the country’s future.

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.

Much of the violence, he noted, was concentrated in the Rift Valley, which produces roughly half of the country’s milk. During the month-long upheaval, “farmers’ animals were stolen, infrastructure was destroyed, and people just scattered.”

In December 2007, just before the violent outbreak, the country was producing 1.2 million liters of milk per day. But during the violence–January and February–output dropped by half, to 600,000 liters per day. Now, Gichohi said, it had rebounded to 850,000 liters daily.

It is the cold season here, and dairy cows are producing less milk than during warmer times. So it seemed that the dairy industry was making a fairly swift rebound, and that in a few months it was conceivable to approach the pre-violence numbers.

But Gichohi said it wouldn’t be so easy.

“It will take us one to two years to get back to where it was,” he said. “As our prime minister said in London, ‘Kenyans have gone to hell and we don’t want to go back.’ That’s how we feel. We hope those crazy days don’t come back.”