Refugees are volunteering as fire-fighters in Australia

Having fled war and persecution in their home nations, refugees in Australia are volunteering to fight the bushfires that strike the outback during the hot, dry and windy summer months.

While Australia has limited the number of refugees it will accept a number of refugees who arrived by boat between 2010 and 2013 are stepping forward to protect the forests and to protect the people who live there.

A large proportion of refugees who found a new life in Australia settled in the south and east of Melbourne where there's a shortage of fire-fighters.

"Five years ago, there weren’t enough volunteers to run even a training exercise ... let alone enough to have enough people, reliably on call for when real fires broke out," Terence Sandford of the Noble Park Fire Service told Al Jazeera.

We had about 12 members in the brigade and that’s really not enough for what we want to do in the community, so we really had to do something to change that around.

Out of the 52 volunteers based at Noble Park, half are immigrants.

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