Miranda Paul: Hello, this is Miranda Paul, and I'm the author of One Plastic Bag:Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia.

I'm going to tell you a bit about how I came to write this book, and then I'll share an excerpt with you.

A long time ago, when I was a teacher in the Gambia, I was introduced to wonderful woven purses made out of litter that had lined the roads, and someone told me that there was a woman named Isatou Ceesay who lived in the village of Njau, who was fed up with all of the garbage and the lack of a system to clean it up. And she decided to pick it up and start a fair trade cooperative in her village.

It took me several years before I actually got to meet Isatou, but when I did get to meet her, I knew that this was a story that people needed to hear. It was a true story about how one person can make a difference. And I know that when I interviewed Isatou, I learned at the beginning that there were only five women who were willing to do this, and that that they were mocked, but over the course of the last 18 years, they had cleaned up their village and turned the entire mentality of the village around, so it really was a story of one person making a difference and having a natural intuition to do what is right, and I wanted to tell that story.

The research took a lot of time over years, I had a Wolof language tutor while I was in the Gambia, so that I could learn some of the local language. I took photographs and videos, I documented the process of recycling the bags, and then I took to writing the story with Isatou's help, and that process took more than a year. In total, it was a 12 year story of my life.

When I was a teacher in the Gambia, I had very few books that were about real Gambian people. One Plastic Bag is the first book that we have come across that is a traditionally published picture book in the United States about a real Gambian woman. And now I will read an excerpt to you from One Plastic Bag.

The goats foraged through the trash for food. Her feet stop. She knows too much to ignore it now. Holding her breath, she plucks one plastic bag from the pile. Then two, then 10, then 100. "What can we do?" Isatou asks her friends. "Let's wash them," says Fatim, pulling out Omo's soap. Marem grabs a bucket and Incha fetches water from the well. Peggy finds clothespins, and they clipped the washbags on the line.