When Indonesia burns, these women run towards the fire

Irma smells the fire before she sees it: a column of thick, yellow-tinged smoke rising above the tree line near her small wooden home.

She pulls on heavy rubber boots, checks her equipment and drives straight into the impenetrable smog emanating from wildfires devouring the peatland and ancient forests of Borneo.

“I am terrified that the flames will reach residential areas. It is extremely dangerous,” the 39-year-old mother told This Week in Asia, moments before disappearing into the murk that has settled over the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan.

Irma, who like many Indonesians only goes by one name, is one of roughly 150 Muslim women who make up Power of Mama, an all-female volunteer firefighting unit that heads out every day during the dry season to battle blazes smouldering deep beneath the island’s peatlands.

They fight fires lit, deliberately or otherwise, by the agricultural burning of poor farming communities clearing land the cheapest way they know how. This year, those fires arrived earlier and burned harder than most can remember, fuelled climate anomalies and drought conditions.

“We are the ones who feel its effects most,” said Irma, who is the group’s coordinator, explaining that it was women who were left to care for housebound children through increasingly long stretches of the year.