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9 Wangari Maathai -

Voice of the Trees

Warm Up

● Do you have trees around your homes?

● Why are trees important for the Earth?

Reading skills

Born on April 1, 1940, Wangari Maathai grew up in a small village located in the central

highlands of Kenya. The earth was all clothed in green - fig trees, olive trees, crotons and flame
trees. In the stream near her homestead where she went to collect water for her mother, she
played with glistening frogs’ eggs, trying to gather them like beads into necklaces, though
they slipped through her finger back into the clear water. Her heart was filled with the beauty

of her native Kenya when she left to attend college in America, very far from her home. There
she studied biology, the science of living things. It was a very inspiring time for Wangari. The

students in America in those days, dreamed of making the world better. She was also taught
by the nuns that she should 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 learned!

She had been away only for five years but the landscape of Kenya had changed so much!
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 export, now almost, all

the farms were growing crops to sell. Wangari noticed
that the people no longer grew what they needed, but
bought food from stores. It was expensive and the little
they could afford was not as good for them as what they

had grown themselves, so children, even grown-ups
were weak and 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. Women and children had

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