Page 79 - EarthHeroes

Isatou stood at the edge of the village and looked at the ugly heap of rubbish piled high on the red earth. Amongst the discarded tins, food and bike tyres, one thing stood out: there were plastic bags everywhere. Mosquitoes swarmed above murky puddles of water pooled on bags on the ground. Two of her neighbour’s goats perched on the rubbish, foraging for food. She shooed them away. Isatou had heard that many people’s goats had died recently. When the butcher cut them open, he had found plastic knotted in their stomachs.
It was 1997, and 25-year-old Isatou Ceesay was taking a walk through her village of N’jau in the centre of the Gambia – the smallest country in Africa. As she turned down the dusty main street, women greeted her from their courtyards as they prepared vegetables and washed clothes. The smell of familiar dishes filled the air. Children played in a clearing by the forest, and cows grazed near a field of peanuts. Later that afternoon, she sat with five friends in the shade of a tree for the first meeting of her women’s group.
Over recent years, Isatou’s community had faced increasing problems with waste. In the Gambia, many people live in poverty. Here and in many countries around the world, there are no weekly rubbish collections to take away waste, so people have no choice but to leave it piled in the streets. Ever since she could remember, in her village, people had thrown their rubbish behind their homes. As a little girl, she had carried shopping back from the market in a basket, but then everyone started using plastic bags instead. Now those bags were killing animals, there were malaria outbreaks from mosquitoes, and vegetables weren’t growing because of rubbish in the soil. Worst of all, Isatou had watched her friends burning plastic as fuel for cooking, releasing toxic fumes that were harmful to people. The waste problem was huge, but Isatou was determined to do something about it.
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