Page 80 - EarthHeroes

Isatou grew up in N’jau with two sisters and a brother. Her parents were farmers. As a girl, Isatou used bits of
waste, like scraps of cloth and wood, to make dolls and other toys. This made her popular with her
friends because children in her village didn’t have many things to play with. She was a bright girl who loved learning and always came near the top of her
class. Sadly, Isatou’s father died when she was just 10 years old and her mother was left to support the family alone. Isatou desperately wanted to go to high
school, but her mother couldn’t afford to send her. She needed Isatou to work to bring money into the home. This wasn’t unusual; in the Gambia an estimated 75 per cent of children do not have access to a proper education.
So Isatou stayed in N’jau, taking jobs and making and selling things. But she didn’t give up her passion for learning; she realised she would have to find her own way of getting the education that she had missed out on. When she was 20, she sold the cow she had inherited when her father died and used the money to attend Gambia Technical Training Institute in the capital city, Banjul, to train as a secretary. After returning home, she became a volunteer with the US Peace Corps, seeing this as a chance to get more training while helping her community. It was through the Peace Corps that Isatou learned about the possibilities of recycling waste, knowledge that would change her life and
the lives of many in N’jau and beyond.
Isatou’s sister had taught her how to crochet, and this gave her an idea for how to upcycle the plastic bags that were causing so many problems – changing them from waste into something valuable. She would turn them into purses that could be sold to make money. Isatou persuaded five friends to join her to form a new women’s group, and together they collected bags from the rubbish pile, washed them and dried them out. Then, that first afternoon beneath
the tree, they carefully cut each bag into a long continuous thread of plastic several centimetres wide – called ‘plarn’, or plastic yarn. With this, they started to crochet small purses for coins, using different coloured plarn to add pretty patterns. It took eight hours or more to make one purse and each used up around 10 plastic bags. The women were delighted with what they had made.
Some people laughed at Isatou and her friends, telling them they were ‘dirty’ for digging around in the rubbish. Some men told her that her plans couldn’t work because she was a woman and too young to be a leader. But Isatou believed
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