What can’t go untold are the parting words by the great philosophy foretold by one of the greatest leaders who lived, Mama Wangari Mathai.
The Story of the Hummingbird, as told by celebrated Kenyan environmental activist, women’s rights advocate, and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Wangari Maathai in the clip from Dirt!
“We are constantly being bombarded by problems that we face and sometimes we can get completely overwhelmed,” Professor Maathai begins…
The story of the hummingbird is about this huge forest being consumed by a fire. All the animals in the forest come out and they are transfixed as they watch the forest burning and they feel very overwhelmed, very powerless, except this little hummingbird. It says, ‘I’m going to do something about the fire!’ So it flies to the nearest stream and takes a drop of water. It puts it on the fire, and goes up and down, up and down, up and down, as fast as it can.
In the meantime, all the other animals, much bigger animals like the elephant with a big trunk that could bring much more water, they are standing there helpless. And they are saying to the hummingbird, ‘What do you think you can do? You are too little. This fire is too big. Your wings are too little and your beak is so small that you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.’
But as they continue to discourage it, it turns to them without wasting any time and it tells them, ‘I am doing the best I can.’
And that to Wangari Mathai is what all of us should do. We should always be like a hummingbird.
I may be insignificant, but I certainly don’t want to be like the animals watching the planet goes down the drain. I will be a hummingbird; I will do the best I can in the health ministry if given chance.
All of us wherever we are, the daily struggle that we go through to make a living, the tussles and the bustles that we go through always let us be the hummingbird and do the best we can and by so doing our county will be greater than never before.
