This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A Production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

She grew up in an African paradise.

Born in 1940 in Kenya, Wangari Matai was surrounded by trees, plains, and rivers. She could see all kinds of exotic animals right in her own backyard.

By the time she reached adulthood, new programs in the United States and Kenya

encouraged Kenyan women to receive the education they had previously been denied.

Wangari took advantage of this.

She had grown up seeing how women in Kenya were often treated.

They were told to submit to their husbands and be easy to

control, to not develop any skills outside of homemaking. And that wasn't the life that

Wangari wanted. She received an undergraduate degree in biology at a university in

Atchison, Kansas of all places, and then a master's degree in biological sciences at a university

in Pittsburgh. She then returned home to Kenya and attended the University of Nairobi, where

in 1971, she became the first woman in all of East Africa to earn a doctorate, a PhD in

veterinary anatomy. Her education was clearly an adventure unto itself, but her story

had only just begun, because as she worked at the university, more and more women from local

villages came to ask for her help. Their water sources were drying up, their trees were dying,

and they were having to walk farther and farther for food, water, and firewood.

...