CNS STORY: Nobel Peace Prize winner gives some credit to Kansas Catholic college

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NOBEL-MAATHAI Oct-11-2004 (850 words) With photo posted Oct. 8. xxxn

Nobel Peace Prize winner gives some credit to Kansas Catholic college

By Catholic News Service

ATCHISON, Kan. (CNS) -- The 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize says a small Catholic college in Kansas was instrumental in making her "who I am and may ever become," according to correspondence released by the school.

Wangari Muta Maathai, a native of Kenya who now serves as assistant minister of environment and natural resources in her homeland, graduated from Mount St. Scholastica College, now Benedictine College in Atchison, with a bachelor's degree in biology in 1964.

In a recent letter to the Benedictine Sisters who serve at the college, Maathai said they "became more than my teachers: They became my friends, mothers and sisters."

"They touched my life so profoundly and made it so much better then ... and now," she added. "They made the Mount my home and gave me the most wonderful four years which have partly made me who I am and may ever become."

Maathai, the first black African woman to win a Nobel prize in any field, went on to earn a master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate at the University of Nairobi in Kenya.

The women at Mount St. Scholastica "did everything to help me, educate me and enrich my life," said Maathai, one of the first two women from Africa to attend the Kansas college.

"I had already benefited from a full scholarship, yet I continued to receive so much more," she added. "I think this is partly where I got my deep sense of service and my detachment from things material.

"On a daily basis, I saw women working hard for higher goals and inner goals," Maathai said. "This must have impacted my own conscience and values as I matured."

The 64-year-old founder of Kenya's community-based Green Belt Movement -- which was established in 1977 to improve the environment, empower women and fight corruption in Africa -- was honored in the Nobel citation as "a strong voice speaking for the best forces in Africa to promote peace and good living conditions on that continent."

"Maathai stands at the front of the fight to promote ecologically viable social, economic and cultural developments in Kenya and in Africa," the Nobel committee added. "She has taken a holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights and women's rights in particular."

The peace prize and a $1.3 million cash award are to be presented to Maathai on Dec. 10 in Oslo, Norway.

At an Oct. 10 ceremony in Nairobi, Kalonzo Musyoka, Maathai's boss as Kenya's minister of the environment and natural resources, gave her a huge bouquet of flowers and called the Nobel Peace Prize a "pedestal" from which the assistant minister can now make "authoritative statements," not only on the environment but on democracy and other topics.

But gaining a voice -- and even a job -- was not easy when Maathai returned to Kenya in the late 1960s.

At a job interview, according to a September 1996 Reader's Digest profile, she was told, "Surely a pretty young thing like you can't have a master's in science. These aren't real degrees, are they?"

After earning her doctorate, she became the first woman professor at the University of Nairobi. Her work with the National Council of Women in Kenya led her to start organizing women to plant trees as a way of combating the increasing deforestation and cash-crop farming she was witnessing all around her.

"As I did that, I got to understand more and more about linkages between the environment and women, women and energy, women and food, women and poverty, women and water -- it gave me a view of how central to our life the environment is," said Maathai in a January 2003 interview.

Since the Green Belt Movement began in 1977, its members have planted more than 25 million trees in farms, public lands and forests around Kenya.

Maathai married in 1969 but divorced in the 1980s after her husband, a parliamentarian, accused her of being "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control." The couple has three grown children.

Following an unsuccessful bid for the Kenyan presidency in 1997, Maathai won a seat in parliament in the December 2002 elections. She was appointed assistant environment minister the next month.

In 1989, Benedictine College named Maathai -- who was known as "Mary Jo" at the school -- as a co-winner of its Offeramus Medal, established by Mount St. Scholastica in 1957 to recognize alumnae "who have served others significantly in the spirit of Christ."

Benedictine Sister Thomasita Homan, a Benedictine College English professor and longtime friend of Maathai and her family, called the Nobel Peace Prize winner "a woman faithful to her dream, faithful to her environment, faithful to her people and her many friends and faithful to her country and the world at large."

"Environment and peace have been the pattern of her life since her college days at Mount St. Scholastica," she added.

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Contributing to this story was Cathy Majtenyi in Nairobi.

END

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