The Haze Scared Our Children. So They Decided to Help.
What the haze looked like from a preschool
Outdoor play moved indoors. The view from our windows blurred to grey. We had to explain why there was no water play, no sand pit, no mud kitchen, no waving to the rubbish truck, no wheeling around in ride-on cars outdoors. We started checking PSI readings every morning.
But the haze didn't just change our routine. One little boy refused to leave school at pick-up unless his mum brought a face mask for him. One little girl cried and refused to go outside on a clear day, because her daddy had told her the air was bad and makes her cough, and fear like that doesn't lift as quickly as smoke does.
The children kept asking: Why is the weather bad? Why can't we go outside?
And then one of them asked the question that started us all thinking:
"Can we stop the fires?"
The honest answer is no. But we couldn't say it.
What our children don't know is how much worse it is where the fires actually are. In Kalimantan, PM2.5 levels have regularly exceeded 1000, many times anything we've seen here. Children and the elderly there are at real risk, and there have been deaths and hospitalizations. And the firefighters on the front line (many youth volunteers) are working through dense smoke without proper protective gear, while fires have roughly doubled compared to last year and funding has been cut.
As adults, the haze gave us something harder to shake: a glimpse of a future where our children can't take clean air for granted. The haze will pass for us some day soon, as it always does. But that shouldn't be where this story ends. Maybe our little might not do very much, but when we think about what the children’s future world would look like, we can’t just sit back without taking action.
So we bottled some clean air
"Indonesia is sending oxygen to people?"
“Can we send air to people too?”
We sometimes forget how much our children are listening. Maybe they don’t fully understand and their imaginations take them elsewhere, but they are still listening. And sometimes, their innocent thoughts out loud make the best ideas.
Our children have been collecting and washing recycled bottles and jars, designing their own labels, and sealing each one with clean air. Every bottle carries a QR code straight to the donation page for haze shelters and firefighters in Borneo. Take a bottle and support how you wish. The children get nothing but the joy of helping, which, if you've met any under-6s, is a genuinely large amount.
Three ways to help
Support youth firefighters and haze shelters in Borneo. S$700 adopts a whole "Place of Safety", a sealed room with air purifiers. The goal is 40 of them, plus protective gear for firefighters and funds to grow the team.
Give to the Singapore Red Cross Haze & Heat Relief fund.
Support Borneo wildlife conservation, and buy sustainable palm oil. Unsustainable palm oil drives these fires. Every purchase is a vote.
When the smoke clears here, it hasn't cleared there
Our skies will turn blue again in a few weeks. Our children will run outside and forget. But in Borneo… burnt forests, displaced wildlife, exhausted fire crews, communities breathing bad air for months… Recovery takes years, and it takes ongoing support.
The fires don't end when we stop seeing the smoke. Our children asked if they could stop the fires. They can't, not really. But they refused to do nothing, and honestly, we're just following their lead.
