Will you be the hummingbird?

Photo Credit: Chris Charles, Unsplash 

“It is the little things citizens do. That’s what will make the difference.”

Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai was often in our classrooms and assemblies in the schools I worked with across the world. Not in person, but with her voice and her resolve to make the difference. Her “little thing” found her behind a mass movement of women and men. She was jailed and beaten, honoured and lauded and finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She was also feared by those in power because they knew that she was right – it was the “little things” that she did that still make the big difference today. Images that flood our tech streams may indicate otherwise, together with the men in suits who posture and connect across political ideologies that centre in the self. 

We have entered the era of ‘Autocracy, Inc. the dictators who want to rule the world’ as described by Anne Applebaum in her book of the same name, where power and money in the hands of the very few are the only game changers. And therein lies Wangari Maathai’s strength, courage and intelligence. She moved us away from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’ and together managed to become a force behind the Green Belt Movement – one that has taken hold all over the world where trees can be planted. That is only part of Maathai’s struggle. Hers was a fight with and for us all; all over the world. A permanent struggle against injustice and hatred, against oppression and the silencing of others, towards a world that can continue and thrive long after we are gone from its physical landscape. 

There is evidence of her legacy in many different forms; in urban and rural communities, among the island people that hold tight to their shores, amongst urban street hawkers who band together to maintain the right to a livelihood, between artisan miners in the DRC who, in their shortened lives, still harbour hope for safer working conditions, and the girls and women who defy their husbands to walk the streets at night united against violence are just some examples of those who are making a difference. Then there are our young children who continue to question ‘why’ of the adults around them in an effort to understand and develop their own thinking instead of blindly adopting that of others, who should know better.

We live in a moment of great courage and resolve. All over the world there are examples of human resistance, audaciousness, truth and creative resolve to live in and with this world, differently. Wangari Maathai’s reading of her own children’s book, made into a short film, illustrates her simple yet powerful message. 

We are now more than twenty years on from her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Norway on 10 December 2004 yet our world is even further degraded in both environmental and human terms, so the call to do “the little things” remains. It takes enormous courage, resolve and sustained energy to be the hummingbird among the powerful and there are many ways in which we can use our ‘drop of water’

As we end this shorter month of the year and towards autumn in the southern hemisphere, the evidence of spring is beginning to be seen in the north. All over the world, Muslims prepare for 30 days of fasting, prayer and reflection during Ramadan. What better time to think about the moment we are living in and continue to be that humming bird, now.