InterestEng.                                                            Stories by English Language Learners.

This wonderful story from Paris, France is abridged from the youth website Newsela. You can read the full story here.

THE great Seine River, unfortunately, has a big problem. There is garbage, trash, plastic, and other waste in it. In fact, around 360 tons of plastic are found in the Seine every year. There are even laws that do not let people swim in the water.

Anne Hidalgo is the mayor of Paris. She wants to clean the river. She wants people to swim in the Seine by 2024. That is when the city will host the Olympic Games. Cleaning the river is a big job. Lucky for Hidalgo, 11-year-old Raphael is on the case.

Raphael fishes junk out of the river. He has done it nearly every weekend for the past two years. He fishes with his dad, Alexandre de Fages de Latour. They can catch a ton of trash in a single day. A ton is about how much a small car weighs.

They have caught everything from iPhones to scooters. The biggest thing Raphael found was a motorcycle. It was so heavy it took an entire team of people to pull it out.

Raphael learned about cleaning rivers from YouTube. In 2019, he found a video. People were fishing metal objects out of rivers. They used ropes attached to magnets. A magnet is a material that can pull iron toward it.

That Christmas Raphael asked his parents for supplies. He wanted some rope, a hook, and a powerful magnet. The magnet was very strong. It could attract metal objects weighing more than a ton.

When he began, fishing for metal was just something to do on the weekends. But Raphael soon saw just how much junk there was at the bottom of the river. He wanted to do more. It became like a full-time job, he said.

Last October Raphael won an award for his efforts. He received the Medal of Paris.

Raphael is confident about his progress in the last two years. One section of the Seine is clearer than the rest of the river. That is where he first started fishing for metal.

Raphael cannot clean the river alone by 2024. But he hopes he is one of the first to swim in the water once it is safe.