Muslim women travel to Australian town devastated by bushfires to cook meals for exhausted firefighters
A Muslim women has been commended after they traveled to a town devastated by the bushfires raging across Australia and worked to help those affected. Several members of the Newport Islamic Society traveled to Victoria's East Gippsland, which has seen 766,000 hectares of land burned by the fires, to cook meals for exhausted firefighters at the Johnsonville Volunteer Fire Brigade this past weekend, according to the Daily Mail.
"It was very emotional to see how tired and drained they were. They were just exhausted," volunteer Lookman El Kurdi told the site. "It felt really good to at least give them food and pray for them and show we are thinking about them."
El Kurdi said the group felt they had a duty to help the firefighters after seeing how the bushfires had impacted the country over the past few months, razing millions of hectares of land and killing people and animals alike.
Besides cooking the meal, the Newport Islamic Society also collected five truckloads of much-needed items that will be delivered across the region.
"We were seeing all these bushfires that were happening around Australia and felt we needed to do something," El Kurdi explained. "We put the call out and within 48 hours we had collected so many items."
ABC reported that light rain did fall across East Gippsland this week, offering some relief in the fire-ravaged region, with another 10 millimeters expected on Monday, January 6.
However, authorities reportedly are expecting the blazes across East Gippsland, the north-east and Alpine regions to flare again from Thursday, January 9, and put dozens of communities back in the line of fire. There is also a fear that hundreds of threatened species, including the brushtail rock wallaby, diamond python, the spot-tailed quoll, and a number of freshwater fish, have been impacted by the bushfires.
James Todd, of the Department of Environment, Land, Water, and Planning, said a wildlife triage center would be set up to help these species. "We've got lots of concerns, we're planning and doing some analysis on species that are likely to be impacted," he said. "The scale of what we're dealing with here is going to be enormous."