By Miranda Paul
The true story of Isatou Ceesay, a woman in the Gambia who looked at the plastic bags piling up around her village and figured out how to turn them into purses she could sell.
Isatou is walking home in Njau, in the Gambia, when the basket she's carrying breaks. Baskets do that. Then she finds something that doesn't break: a plastic bag. Over the years the bags multiply. People drop them, the wind piles them into drifts, they collect water and breed mosquitoes, and the goats that wander through eat them and die. Isatou is ashamed of the mess and nobody else seems to see it. So she washes the dirty bags, cuts them into long strips, and teaches herself to crochet the strips into purses. She and four other women work in secret at first, because the village laughs at them. Then the purses sell. The women earn money, the drifts of plastic shrink, and the goats come back.
Most environmental books hand a child a problem the size of the planet. This one hands them a problem the size of a village, and then shows a real woman solving it with her hands, for money, in a way that worked. That scale is what makes it land. Your child can follow every step of Isatou's thinking, from the broken basket to the first ugly purse to the day the neighbors stop laughing, and come away believing that noticing a mess and doing something about it is a normal thing a person can do.