Waiting for Kenya’s Tree Lady
Posted: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 3:59 PM
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On Assignment
By Yuka Tachibana, NBC News Producer
NAIROBi, Kenya – "Don’t worry! She’ll be here…" Anne Nzuva, one of the organizers of a human rights symposium on the outskirts of Nairobi, reassured me.
But already, "she" was over an hour late. I stared out at the road leading to the gates of the compound we were waiting in, but there was no sign of her famous green Pajero (a sport utility vehicle made by Mitsubishi).
We are waiting for Professor Wangari Maathai, affectionately known as the "Tree Lady" of Kenya. She is a formidable advocate of tree planting and environmental protection, a human rights activist, and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Grassroots environmental movement
The NBC News team I was with – correspondent Martin Fletcher and cameraman Jeff Riggins – had spent the past week driving up and down the bumpy roads of central Kenya as we filmed a story about Maathai for the Nightly News with Brian Williams.
Maathai grew up in a remote village perched between lush, green, rolling hills and, you guessed it, lots of magnificent trees. The mud hut she helped build as a girl still stands, but she no longer lives there. Instead, it has been turned into a tree nursery, which is being looked after by her niece and nephew.
Over the years, Kenya lost many of its trees due to a devastating mix of development, corruption and land-grabbing. In the late 1970s, Maathai founded the Greenbelt Movement, a grassroots environmental group, and made it her mission to replant trees and put a stop to deforestation.
We visited a tree nursery run by rural villagers. The Greenbelt Movement pays villagers to tend to tree saplings and to replant them in forests. The villagers buy goats with the money they earn. From the goats, the villagers get milk and eventually sell their offspring.
In other words, the Greenbelt Movement’s work is not just about tree planting, but also about creating an income generating incentive for those who live in rural and often poor communities. Maathai and her supporters have already planted over 30 million trees in Kenya.
While Maathai’s movement many seem like a noble cause to many, that was not always the case. For many years, her activism was a target of the government of Kenya’s former president, Daniel Arap Moi.
When Maathai and her supporters attempted to block the unlawful development of upscale homes inside a national forest on the outskirts of Nairobi, she was beaten and ended up in the hospital with head injuries. From her hospital bed, she vowed to "fight the government" which supported the development of the area. And she did. The planned development was subsequently scrapped.
Later, she and her supporters went back and planted tree saplings on the site. When we went to film there some eight years after the violent incident, the place looked rather uneventful. It had reverted back to being just an ordinary part of the forest with young trees and shrubbery.
Only thing missing – the Tree Lady herself
So after four days of filming around Kenya, we had some good elements for the professor’s profile. But one crucial part of the story remained conspicuously missing – the Tree Lady herself.
I had spent two-and-a-half weeks prior to us filming in Kenya negotiating for an interview with her. It was a rather frustrating process, where my daily calls to the professor’s office were met with various shades of ambiguity.
Some days, the interview sounded like it would happen, but most of the time it seemed like a lost cause. Fellow journalists who had attempted interviews with her advised me that she was one busy lady who had a fully booked calendar that changed so often that it was almost impossible for her to commit to an interview in advance.
After all, she has become an international celebrity. As an acclaimed environmentalist, her simple message to plant trees resonates around the world, especially now that climate change is such a hot button issue that’s close to many people’s hearts.
But after having rescheduled several times, we finally had a "definite" plan to interview the Tree Lady. However it was now planned for our last day in Kenya. We had a flight to catch in the afternoon.
We were planning to meet her during a coffee break at a human rights symposium she was attending. The time when she was supposed to arrive and give her keynote speech came and went. I was frantically pacing.
If there was no interview, then there was no story, and the thought of leaving Kenya without a story was weighing on my shoulders. "What if her plans changed and she doesn’t show up???" All we could do was wait.
Finally, nearly two hours later, the green Pajero drove up. And there Maathai was, dressed in a bright blue dress. A group of children who had been waiting to greet her started singing and dancing. The professor joined in and danced with the kids – a giant smile on her face.
The owners of the venue wanted her to plant a tree. With that same giant smile, she obliged. She picked up a sapling about a foot tall. Then she looked at the singing children and called out: "Come children, help me plant this tree." Another tree added to Kenya’s soil by the formidable Tree Lady.
Still smiling, she finally sat down for an interview with us. Phew… She says she wants to plant two billion trees worldwide by the end of 2008! And we made the flight out of Nairobi on time, too.
