Page 82 - EarthHeroes

community recycling project had grown to
50 women and she named it the N’jau Recycling and Income Generation Group (NRIGG).
Women in N’jau were now able to save some
money, and Isatou helped them to open their
own bank accounts. With their savings, many
of the women could afford to support their
families in ways that would have been impossible
before. Their daughters could continue into
secondary school and they could pay for medical treatment when they needed it. The women helped
their community, too, each contributing some of their earnings to start a community garden to grow vegetables, and to help pay for orphans to go to school.
But Isatou wanted to find more ways to share her knowledge and help people in her village. In 2000, she got a job as a language and culture helper with the Peace Corps and, through this, she helped to secure funding to build a skills centre in N’jau, where the women could meet and work together. Here they could learn about the importance of caring for their environment and about the dangers of burning plastic. Isatou started to teach classes on subjects such as gardening, soap-making and tie-dying, and the women were able to sell many of the things they made. She had learned about nutrition and gave cooking demonstrations on how to prepare meals full of vitamins and minerals to keep their children healthy.
The women of the NRIGG continued to make their bags and purses and, in 2007, they even started to sell them to people in America, with the help of friends Isatou had made through her work. They also began to think of ideas for using other types of waste. They turned food waste into compost for their vegetable plots. They sold scrap metal, turned bike tyres into jewellery, and crafted colourful bags from old rice sacks. They made beads from paper and even learned how to turn truck tyres into armchairs and stools. They made skipping ropes and used leftover bits of plastic bag to stuff footballs, so that local children had toys to play with.
And there were other ways they could help the environment too. People usually burned charcoal for fuel, and this was made from trees cut down from the local forest. The women found a way to combine old coconut husks, mango leaves
82