PICTURE BOOK - Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees by Franck Prevot

Illustrated by Aurelia Fronty

2015 Charlesbridge Publishing

HC $17.99

40 pgs.

Goodreads rating:  4.28 - 414 ratings

My rating:  5

Endpapers"  Deep, sleek plum

1^st line/s:  "The immense forest around Wangari's childhood home is populated by bongo antelopes, monkeys, and butterflies."

My comments:  Woah, I've read five picture books about Wangari Maathai, but this is the one that's jam-packed with information for older readers, instead of just mentioning things, fleshing them out a little more.  We learn HOW she got to the US for college, HOW she protested, and WHY she ended up in prison.  Wonderful book, perfect to use with 4th, 5th, 6th graders studying the environment, making a difference in the world, activism, trees, Tu'Bshvat,......

Read the Text

Goodreads:  Wangari Maathai received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her efforts to lead women in a nonviolent struggle to bring peace and democracy to Africa through its reforestation. Her organization planted over thirty million trees in thirty years. This beautiful picture book tells the story of an amazing woman and an inspiring idea.

Text for Wangari's Trees of Peace by Jeanette Winter

Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa by Jeanette Winter

“The earth was naked.

For me the mission was to try

To cover it with green.”

  ~ Wangari Maathai

Wangari lives under an umbrella of green trees in the shadow of Mount Kenya in Africa.

She watches the birds in the forest where she and her mother go to gather firewood for cooking.

And she helps harvest the sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and maize from the rich soil.

Wangari shines in school,

and when she grows tall, like the trees in the forest,

she wins a scholarship to study in America.

Six years later, her studies over, Wangari returns to her Kenya home and sees a change.

What has happened? She wonders.

Where are the trees?

Wangari sees women bent from hauling firewood miles and miles from home.

She sees barren land where no crops grow.

And where are the birds?

Thousands of trees have been cut down to make room for buildings, but no one planted new trees to take their place.

Will all of Kenya become a desert? She wonders as her tears fall.

Wangari things about the barren land.

I can begin to replace some of the lost trees

Here in my own backyard – one tree at a time.

She starts by planting nine seedlings.

Watching the seedlings take root gives Wangari the idea to plant more –

to start a farm for baby trees, a nursery.

In open space, she plants row after row

of the tiny trees.

Next, Wangari convinces the village women

That planting trees is a good thing.

She gives each one a seedling.

“Our lives will be better when we have trees again.  You’ll see.  We are planting the seeds of hope.”

The women spread out over their village, planting tiny trees in long rows,

like a green belt stretching over the land.

The government men laugh.

“Women can’t do this,” they say.

“It takes trained foresters to plant trees.”

The women ignore the laughter and keep planting.

Wangari pays them a small amount

for each seedling still living after three months –

their first earnings ever.

Word travels,like wind rustling through leaves,

about the green returning to Wangari’s village.

Soon other women in other villages and towns and cities in Kenya are planting long rows of seedlings, too.

But the cutting continues.

Wangari stands tall as an oak to protect

the old trees still remaining.

“We need a park more than we need an office tower.”

The government men disagree.

Wangari blocks their way, so they hit her with clubs.

They call her a troublemaker and put her in jail.

And still she stands tall.

Right is right, even if you’re along.

But Wangari is not alone.

Talk of the trees spreads over all of Africa,

like ripples in Lake Victoria.

More women hear the talk

and plant even more seedlings

in longer and longer rows.

The seedlings take root and grow tall –

until there are over 30 million trees

where there where none.

The umbrella of green in Kenya returns.

Women walk tall, their backs straight,

for now they can gather firewood closer to home.

The land is not longer barren.

Sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and maize

Grow again tn the rich, red earth.

The whold world hears of Wangari’s trees

and of her army of women who planted them.

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.

Text for Planting the Trees of Kenya by Claire A. Nivola

Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire A. Nivola

     As Wangari Maathai tells it, when she was growing up on a farm in the hills of central Kenya, the earth was clothed in its dress of green.

     Fig trees, olive trees, crotons, and flame trees covered the land, and fish filled the pure waters of the streams. 

     The fig tree was sacred then, and Wangari knew not to disturb it, not even to carry its fallen branches home for firewood.  In the stream near her homestead where she went to collect water for her mother, she played with glistening flogs’ eggs, trying to gather them like beads into necklaces, though they slipped through her fingers back into the clear water.

     Her heart was filled with the beauty of her native Kenya when she left to attend a college run by Benedictine nuns in America, far, far from her home.  There she studied biology, the science of living things.  It was an inspiring time for Wangari.  The students in America in those years dreamed of making the world better.  The nuns, too, taught Wangari to think not just of herself but of the world beyond herself.

     How eagerly she returned to Kenya!  How full of hope and of all that she had learned!

She had been away for five years, only five years, but they might have been twenty – so changed was the landscape of Kenya.

     Wangari found the fig tree cut down, the little stream dried up, and no trace of frogs, tadpoles, or the silvery beads of eggs.  Where once there had been little farms growing what each family needed to live on and large plantations growing tea for import, now almost all the farms were growing crops to sell.  Wangari noticed that the people no longer grew what they ate but bought food from stores.  The store food was expensive, and the little they could afford was not as good for them as what they had grown themselves, so that children, even grownups, were weaker and often sickly.   

     She saw that where once there had been richly wooded hills with grazing cows and goats, now the land was almost treeless, the woods gone.  So many trees had been cut down to clear the way for more farms that women and children had to walk farther and farther in search of firewood to heat a pot or warm the house.  Sometimes they walked for hours before they found a tree or bush to cut down.  There were fewer and fewer trees with each one they cut, and much of the land was as bare as a desert.

     Without trees there were no roots to hold the soil in place.  Without trees there was no shade.  The rich topsoil dried to dust, and the “devil wind” blew it away.  Rain washed the loose earth into the once-clear streams and rivers, dirtying them with silt.

     “We have no clean drinking water,”  The women of the countryside complained, “no firewood to cook with.  Our goats and cows have nothing to graze on, so they make little milk.  Our children are hungry and we are poorer than before.”

     Wangari saw that the people who had once honored fig trees and now cut them down had forgotten to care for the land that fed them.  Now the land, weak and suffering, could no longer take care of the people, and their lives became harder than ever.

     The women blamed others, they blamed the government, but Wangari was not one to complain.  She wanted to do something.  “Think of what we ourselves are doing,” she urged the women.  “We are cutting down the trees of Kenya.

     “When we see that we are part of the problem,” she said, “we can become part of the solution.”

     She had a simple and big idea.

     “Why not plant trees?”  she asked the women.

     She showed them how to collect tree seeds from the trees that remained.  She taught them to prepare the soil, mixing it with manure.  She showed them how to wet that soil, press a hole in it with a stick, and carefully insert a seed.  Most of all she taught them to tend the growing seedlings, as if they were babies, watering them twice a day to make sure they grew strong.

     It wasn’t easy.  Water was always hard to come by.  Often the women had to dig a deep hole by hand and climb into it to haul heavy bucketfuls of water up over their heads and back out of the hole.  An early nursery in Wangari’s backyard failed; almost all the seedlings died.  But Wangari was not one to give up, and she showed others how not to give up.

     Many of the women could not read or write.  They were mothers and farmers, and no one took them seriously.

     But they did not need schooling to plant trees.  They did not have to wait for the government to help them.  They could begin to change their own lives.

     All this was heavy work, but the women felt proud.  Slowly, all around them, they could begin to see the fruit of the work of their hands.  The woods were growing up again.  Now when they cut down a tree, they planted two it its place.  Their families were healthier, eating from the fruit trees they had planted and from the vegetable plots filled again with the yams, cassava, pigeon peas, and sorghum that grew so well.  They had work to do, and the work brought them together as one, like the trees growing together on the newly wooded hills.

     The men saw what their wives, mothers, and daughters were doing and admired them and even joined in. 

  

     Wangari gave seedlings to the schools and taught the children how to make their own nurseries. 

     She gave seedlings to inmates of prisons and even to soldiers.  “You hold your gun,” she told the soldiers, “but what are you protecting?  The whole country is disappearing with the wind and wter.  You should hold the gun in your right hand and a tree seedling in your left.  That’s when you become a good soldier.”

     And so in the thirty years since Wangari began her movement, tree by tree, person by person, thirty million trees have been planted in Kenya—and the planting has not stopped.

     “When the soil is exposed,”  Wangari tells us,  “it is crying out for help, it is naked and needs to bec clothed in its dress.  That is the nature of the land.  It needs color, it needs its cloth of green.”

Plus Author’s Note

Text for Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees

Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees by Franck Prevot

2015, Charlesbridge

     It’s almost as if Wangari Maathai is still alive, since the trees she planted still grow.  Those who care about the earth as Wangari did can almost hear her speaking the four languages she knew – Kikuyu, Swahili, English, and German – while she carried out her important work with important people.

     Wangari encouraged many village women.  She dug holes with them in the red soil - holes in which to plant hope for today and forests for tomorrow.

     When Wangari planted a large-leafed ebony tree or an African tulip tree, she was reminded of her own roots.  She was born in 1940 in the little village of Ihithe, across from the majestic volcano Mount Kenya, which her people consider holy.  This is her story.

The immense forest around Wangari’s childhood home is populated by bongo antelopes, monkeys, and butterflies.  The leopard, called the ngari by Wangari’s people, lives here, too.  It may be because wa-ngari means “she who belongs to the leopard” that Wangari feels as though she is part of the entire forest.

     Wangari fetches water every day at the foot of the big mugumo, the generous fig tree.  As the eldest sister of five siblings, she is the second lady of the house.  She helps her mother with countless tasks: gathering wood for the fire, cooking, looking after the little children, and doing farm chores.

     Wangari’s mother gives her a little garden.  Wangari learns to dig and plant.  In the shade of the big mugumo, her mother teacher her that a tree is worth more than its wood, and expression that Wangari never forgets. 

     Wangari’s father works for Sir Neylan, one of the ruling British colonists.  The British claim the best land for themselves and insist that Kenyans take Christian names.  As a result, Wangari is called Miriam during her childhood.  The British grow richer by cutting trees to plant more tea.

     Wangari remembers the first tree she saw fall.

     She doesn’t yet know that she can change things with her voice and her hands.

     One evening in their little house made of mud walls and dried dung, Wangari’s big brother Nderitu asks their mother a questions:  “Why doesn’t Wangari go to school?”

     Wangari knows the answer.  Daughters must help their mothers before getting married and having children of their own.

     But without even realizing it, Nderitu changes things by asking his questions.

     A few days later Wangari is running joyfully to school with her brothers and cousins!  She is thankful to Nderitu for daring to ask the right question, and to her mother for making the decision that will change Wangari’s life.

     Wangari wants to know and understand everything, and going to school helps her succeed.  She receives her high-school diploma at a time when very few African women even learn to read.

     Senator John F. Kennedy, the future US president, invites six hundred young Kenyans to come to the United States to pursue their studies.  Wangari is one of the students.

     For the next five years, Wangari discovers snow, forests of skyscrapers, and people who look nothing like her.  Even cornfields in America are different from those at home.

     Wangari also discovers that even in a great, free, independent country, some places are forbidden to black people.  Just like at home, some schools are for white people only.  During the 1960s angry African Americans demand the same rights as white people.

     At the same time, in faraway Kenya, another anger turns into triumph.  For more than ten years, black people have been demanding the right to cultivate their land and govern their own country.  Now they achieve independence from Britain at last. 

     When Wangari returns home, the British colonists are no longer the masters of Kenya.  The country is free, but the trees are not – they still cannot grow in peace.  Kenyans are cutting down trees and selling them as the colonists did.  By using the land where the trees used to grow to cultivate the tea, coffee, and tobacco sought by rich countries, they can make more money.

     Wangari travels through the country to study wildlife and is shocked.  Wild animals are rare now – they fled the chain saws.  Women can no longer feed their children, since plantations for rich people have replaced food-growing farms.  Rivers are muddy – the soil has been washed away by rain because there are no tree roots to hold it back.

       Now Wangari knows how she will make use of her studies and the people she has met.  She will explain to the world’s great leaders and to Kenya’s farmers that a forest is one of the most precious treasures of humanity.  She’ll tell them that planting thousands of trees will help change the lives of men and women – black and white, rich and poor.  In Kenya and elsewhere.

     Wangari knows that a tree is worth much more than its wood, as her mother taught her.  A tree is a treasure that provides shade, fruit, pure air, and nesting places for birds, and that pulses with the vitality of life.  Trees are hideouts for insects and provide inspiration for poets.  A tree is a little bit of the future.

     /Wangari wants to shout to the world, but change happens slowly.  She doesn’t want to wait.  So in 1977 she creates the Green Belt Movement in order to start planting trees immediately.

     Traveling from village to village, she speaks on behalf of trees, animals, and children.  She asks that people think about the future even if the present is harsh and difficult.  She encourages villagers to discuss their problems in their own words – in the language of their tribe.

     Her words travel to villages, into newspapers, and through letters to the Kenyan government and international organizations.  She needs to raise money because replacing hundreds of thousands of missing trees is expensive.

     Wangari creates tree nurseries across Kenya which she entrusts to village women.  She provides the women with a financial bonus for each tree that grows.

     The government officials who built their fortunes by razing forests try to stop Wangari.  Who is this woman who confronts them with a confident voice in a country where women are supposed to listen and lower their eyes in men’s presence?

     Wangari believes confident women have in important role to play in their families.  In their villages, and on the entire African continent.  She can’t be quiet.  With countless sisters to help, “she who belongs to the lepard” doesn’t get discouraged.  She keeps planting forests.

     Wangari is determined not to let one more single tree be curt down.  She doesn’t lover her eyes, even when she faces President Daniel arap Moi, who will rule Kenya for twenty-four years.

     He wants to build a sixty-story building and a statue of himself in the heart of Uhuru Park in Nairobe.  Wangari rallies her friends to fight the bulldozers, and the project is abandoned.

     Moi then plans to launch a huge real-estate project in Karura’s forest, which would threaten endangered species such as the blue monkey and thie river hog.  Wangari stands tall.  She calls the world to the rescue, replants trees, and forces the president to back off.

          After her victories a Kenyan man tells her:  “You are the only man left standing.”

     But standing up against the authoritarian power of Daniel arap Moi is dangerous.  Wangari is now a threat.  She knows that the president will stop at nothing to silence her – he is a powerful man who orders police to shoot at crowds of demonstrators.

     She is humiliated, hit, hurt, and imprisoned several times, but she doesn’t give up.  Each time she is released, she fights to liberate political prisoners and speaks out against torture.  Wangari receives death threats and often must hide outside of Kenya.  But she perseveres. 

    Wangari wants to make democracy grow – like trees.  She knows that if her people work together to decide the laws of her country, it will become stronger.

     She dreams that Kenya’s children will be able to play with tadpoles in clear water under fig trees at the edge of great forests.  She wants them to be able to eat when they are hungry.

     Wangari quickly realizes how many more battles she must fight in order to save the trees.  She runs several times for elected office, creates an environmental party, and rallies the opposition to try to bring down Daniel arap Moi.

     Facing rising protest, President Moi tries to divide the people in order to rule.  He knows that when tribes fight one another, the president can quietly govern the way he wants.

     Wangari and the Green Belt=Movement help foil Moi’s trap.  She suggests ooffering young plants from tree nurseries to neighboring tribes in symbolic gestures of peace.

     Little by little, those peace trees bear their fruits.  Wangari even succeeds in convincing soldiers to help her cultivate friendships among tribes.

  President Daniel arap Moi finally falls in 200d.  The country has a new constitution, which requires him to retire, and his party loses the election.  Wangari is elected to Parliament.  The new president appoints her assistant minister of the environment, natural resources, and wildlife.

     For Wangari, now affectionately called Mama Miti, or “the mother of trees,” a new part of her story begins.  She now holds the power to make decisions.  She can finally work to make Kenya a fair nation – for women, men . . . and trees!

     Today there are more trees in Kenya than there were when Wangari began her work, and democracy has been established.  The Grteen Belt Movement =still protects trees, such as those in the Congo Basin, the second-largest tropical forest in the world.

     Wangari Maathai and her supporters planted more than thirty million trees.  And every day, even now, new ones are planted in Kenya.

     Wangari Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 8, 2004, for the countless seeds of hope she planted and grew over the years.  She was the first African woman to received the prize.  To celebrate, she planted a Nandi flame tree at her home in Nyeri,k at the bas of Mount Kenya.

     The mountain and the inhabitants of the forests around it – lepoards, bongo antelopes, other wild animals, and humans – must have been proud that day.