They arrive on motorbikes, in a cloud of dust and smoke, carrying hoses, pumps, and hand tools into some of the most punishing terrain on Earth. The Power of Mama is an all-female firefighting crew working in Ketapang Regency, in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo. More than 140 women have been trained for the work by the Indonesia Nature Rehabilitation Initiative Foundation, known as YIARI. Their enemy is not the dramatic wall of flame familiar from wildfire news elsewhere. It is a slower, stranger fire that burns underground in peat, sometimes for months, poisoning the air of an entire region.
Fire That Burns Beneath the Ground
Much of West Kalimantan sits on peatland, deep layers of partially decayed vegetation that hold enormous amounts of carbon and, when dry and drained, enormous fire risk. Peat fires do not rage so much as smoulder, creeping beneath the surface, surfacing where they choose, and resisting every attempt to declare them finished. Putting one out means soaking the ground itself, metre by metre, until the heat is truly gone, work that is measured in days rather than hours. A crew can drench a plot, leave, and be called back to the same smoking ground a week later. It is exhausting, unglamorous labour, and it is exactly the labour the Power of Mama was organised to do.
Why Mothers, and Why Motorbikes
The crew’s name is a statement of method as much as identity. In the villages around Ketapang, mothers are the organisers of daily life: they know every household, every path, and every patch of family land, and they are the first to feel a fire’s effects in children’s coughs and closed schools. Recruiting and training local women turns that knowledge into a fire service that outsiders cannot replicate. Motorbikes suit the reality of the work, carrying small teams quickly down narrow tracks to fires that trucks cannot reach in time. A fast first response matters enormously with peat, because a fire caught in its first hours may take a day to kill, while one left for a week can take a season.
A Crisis Measure in Hectares and Lungs
The context for their work is a national emergency that has been building for months. More than 1.9 million hectares of land, an area twelve times the size of London, have burned in wildfires across Indonesia this season. Hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia have suffered respiratory illnesses from the toxic haze the fires produce. The haze does not respect borders, drifting over neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore and periodically closing schools, grounding flights, and filling clinics far from any flame. Public anger has followed, with protests accusing authorities of ineptitude and corruption in handling a disaster that returns, in some form, almost every dry season. Against numbers like those, a village crew on motorbikes can look small, until you understand that nearly every hectare of that total started as a fire somebody could see from their house.
Prevention Is the Real Shift
The deeper change the Power of Mama represents is a move from response to prevention. Crews patrol during the dry season, watch for smoke, and work with farmers on the land-clearing practices that start so many fires, since burning remains the cheapest way to clear a field. A trusted local crew can make that argument in a way no distant agency can, because its members are neighbours rather than officials. YIARI’s training gives the women the technical side: pumps, hoses, fire behaviour, and safety in heat and smoke. The social side they bring themselves. A fire prevented leaves no headline, which is precisely the point, and precisely why prevention work is chronically undervalued until the haze arrives.
What Their Story Says About the Region
There is a reason this short film travels. Across Asia, the costs of environmental damage land first and hardest on rural women, who carry water, tend the sick, and keep households running when the air turns dangerous. The Power of Mama flips that script, putting the same women in the role of the region’s first responders, trained, equipped, and organised. It is also a reminder that Indonesia’s fire crisis will not be solved from Jakarta alone, or by aircraft and declarations during the worst weeks of smoke. It will be solved, if it is solved, in thousands of places like Ketapang, by people who live with the land and refuse to watch it burn. The women on the motorbikes are not waiting for that future. They are already riding into it, one smoking field at a time.
None of this work is easy on the body or the calendar. Peat smoke is thick with fine particles, the heat inside a smouldering field can defeat ordinary boots and gloves, and the fire season collides with the farming and family duties the women already carry. Shifts are arranged around school runs and harvests, which is another advantage of a local crew: it can flex in ways a posted-in unit cannot. The women describe the work plainly, as protection rather than adventure. They are defending their own children’s lungs, their own villages’ fields, and the forest their communities still depend on.
Source: South China Morning Post
