I’ve just finished three books about Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement and the first African Woman to win a Nobel Prize, in 2004. The first book, Wangari Muta Maathai, (2018) in the How I Changed the World series, is a MG biography that I thought would be a fast, easy and cheerful. What a wake-up call about the challenges, setbacks and hardships she faced. The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (2003) was more of a manual detailing the ten steps toward creating working tree nurseries to empower rural women and men to reclaim their deforested lands. The third, Unbowed: A Memoir (2006) is a dense and at times disturbing account of her unrelenting path towards democracy, dignity and equality first for her beloved rural Kenyans and then beyond. The environmental effect colonization wrought across Africa contrasts badly with Maathai’s family's traditional links to the land. It made me think of what colonization did all across North and South America. It’s time to heal in so many ways.

My heroes: Joan of Arc, a Pacific Islander girl Karana and her dog Rontu, and Martin de Porres.

I used to read comic books like Archie and Veronica, Superman but between 1957 and 1961, I read French Catholic comic books of the lives of the saints. That’s how Joan of Arc, patron saint of France, became my shero.

For my 10th birthday I received a copy of The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell and kept it for years, weeping every time I read it.

A biography of Martin de Porres touched me deeply. He was a lay monk  who lived in 16th-century Lima and is the patron saint of mixed-race people and those who seek racial justice. He’s a life-long hero.

I read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott several summers in a row, and Anne of Green Ga

Family Facts: Three sisters and three brothers, one son and one daughter; one grandson and one granddaughter.

My husband and I have had four dogs and about 10 cats.  I’ve kept a compost pile for 45 years.

Favorite books from when I was a girl:

Anderson’s Fairy Tales and Peter Rabbit

Several of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables