N 67   Books I translated     (  5  )  Part 1

       

I had written about  some of the books I had  translated from English to Burmese. Until now 6 books had been  printed and the last which I am going to tell about it now is on it’s way to be made into a book.

     

  So firstly the title of the book…. I gave the title A Sein Yaung Chit Thu (Green Lover )and the original book is Unbowed written by Wangari  Maathai. I came across this book while reading ex president Clinton’s book  Giving  where he mentioned her name and which I later looked for in the internet.

     

   Wangari was a native of Kenya in east Africa. She grew up in the countryside which was blessed with earth’s abundant yields. She did cultivation with her mother , gathered firewood, and fetched water from the river,and also tended animal. She never thought of them as hard work but was happy to do them. When she was 8 she went to a primary school which was about 3 miles away. After primary school she went to mission schools ran by nuns where she studied for her middle and high school levels.

       

After she finished high school she was selected to study in the US through The Joseph .P. Kennedy Foundation where she studied for her Science degree  majoring in biology at Mount Scholastica University . After receiving her bachelor degree in 1964 she continued for master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh  .

    

  Upon her return to Kenya she worked as a lecturer at the school of Veterinary Medicine of University  College of Nairobi where she also pursued doctoral studies in Germany and at the University of Nairobi and obtained the P. hd degree in 1971.

       

While she served on various boards of many organizations concerning environment and humanity causes she found out that the environment of Kenya was degrading due to overlogging. Because there were no trees on the hills , when the rain  came the soil was washed down into streams and rivers and gradually into the sea.Streams and rivers were also dried up and caused livelihood of people to become difficult and biodiversities to become extinct. Firewood for cooking , wood for fencing, also became scarce. Because the top soil was washed away vegetation did not yield abundantly as they used to be, and this caused people and animals not to have enough food.

….To solve these problems she introduced the idea of community based tree planting. and then continued to develop this idea into a broad based grassroot organization , the Green Belt Movement, whose main focus were poverty reduction, environment conservation and women’s right through tree planting.

Wangari used an incentive to make rural women more interested in planting trees. The Green Belt Movement developed a procedure with 10 steps,from forming a group,locating a site for tree nursery, to planting trees.                      

  …..to Part 2