OneWorld.net (U.S.)

OneWorld.net note: Women and children in Kenya can empower themselves and help the environment if they follow a local grassroots organization's "11th commandment": appreciate the world's resources. Laura Musimbi discusses her three-year-old initiative to advocate tree planting in her home country.

• Musimbi © Peace X PeaceLaura Musimbi began the Kakamega Friends of Nature organization three years ago to encourage "green-versations" among women and children and teach them about the importance of appreciating the Earth's natural resources. Friends of Nature goes from school to school teaching children that planting trees can restore the land and provide useful resources. The organization also encourages women to plant native trees and teaches them to make baskets out of organic fibers.
• Kenya is home to the Mau Forest, a valuable resource for agriculture, water, and tourism that is on the verge of destruction due to logging and charcoal production. The loss of the Mau Forest would be a major blow to the Kenyan economy, say environment experts. "Kenya stands to lose a nature-based economic asset worth over US $300 million alone to the tea, tourism and energy sectors if the forest ...continues to be degraded and destroyed," writes the UN Environment Program.
• The Greenbelt Movement is a Kenyan women's organization launched by the first female African Nobel Peace Prize laureate to advocate for human rights and good governance through the protection of the environment. The group has over 600 members who have planted 30 million trees across Kenya and who work to raise fellow citizens' environmental awareness.

An 11th Commandment: Look to Our World's Resources!

From: Peace X Peace

Laura Musimbi, Kenya

August 2nd, 2008

About three years ago, I started and have registered a C.B.O. called Kakamega Friends of Nature. I now have 50 members. It started as a sideline to our Mitigating Climate Change Project, in which we traveled from school to school showing kids and teachers the need to plant trees to prevent soil erosion, to provide firewood, to provide food for cows, and to restore the fertility to the land.

More importantly, we wanted to encourage communities around Kakamega to plant trees to sequester carbon. One day we would like to see the poor Kenyan farmers get paid to plant trees and to sequester carbon so as to slow down the buildup of the carbon layer in the atmosphere and to mitigate global warming.

Most media agencies paint a woman as a weak vessel, only useful for the business of beauty. I plan to live as an instrument of green-versational change. Besides their routine domestic work and mothering, I feel women can still do better. It is often said that no one in this world is rich enough to pay for his/her mother's milk or for being a passenger in one's mother's womb. But women can reward themselves for this by taking a second look at this world's resources. I take this to be the universal women's eleventh commandment.

My hometown, Kakamega, is next door to the only surviving remnant of equatorial rain forest that stretches right from the Congo basin. I believe that most people who are born and bred close to a natural endowment such as the sea, lake, river, hill, quarry, forest, etc seem to correctly spell the words NEGLECT and IGNORANCE for that resource. Here at Kakamega forest, poachers rob this habitat of her rare indigenous species at the expense of the water head that supplies Lake Victoria - the largest fresh water lake in East Africa.

Besides talking to schools about plants, KFNV will involve pupils to collect different plant species and each construct a booklet herbarium. This act will leave a green mark in these young souls and minds, who hitherto shall be mothers, fathers and leaders of God's tomorrow.

K.F.N.V women volunteers' basic duty is to plant native tree species, caliandra, sesbania and bamboo, on their respective properties. One volunteer woman has donated a 0.25-acre parcel of land for an arboretum. I also introduced learning to fashion fireless cookers, tea cozies, and baskets from locally grown organic fiber. I find fireless cookers and tea cozies - meant to keep cooked food warm or to cook food that was partially pre-cooked - as a relief to women here, whose main task is to cook.

The basic agenda at our local meetings is plants and plant products. Talk about Green-versation!

To read more about the environment and Kenya, visit Peace X Peace.