Yesterday with some friends we decided to go hike to the Kawah Ijen volcano, famous for its blue lava and its huge turquoise crater. I had read about the place, I knew that the air in the crater was highly toxic because the concentration of sulfur, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen chloride were excessively high, putting the health of those who go down to the crater at risk. Despite knowing that, we embarked on our journey to the volcano on the island of Java from ubud, Bali. Arriving at the starting point of the hike, we found a lot of locals selling gloves, socks and hats because it is quite cold. Our guides gave each of us a flashlight and a gas mask. We had to go fast because it was 2 in the morning and the phenomenon of blue lava ends with sunlight, so we had 3 hours to go up and down to the crater.

We started to climb, and I had the opportunity to talk with Sugi one of our guides, who told me that he was a miner, and that every day he went up two or three times to get a ton of sulfur. I asked him if he wore gas mask for the mining process and he said no, that he did not have enough money to buy one, because he told me they cost between 600,000 to 700,000 rupees that is equivalent to 42 to 49 dollars.
While we went up we met several miners offering a taxi service consisting of a wheelbarrow from which they climbed with the person on top.

When we reached the highest point to descend to the crater, we asked our guides that when did we have to put the masks on and he replied that at the moment we began to smell sulfur. We decided to put on the masks from that moment on. When we arrived at the place where the blue lava was, through massive amounts of smoke we tried to observe this phenomenon while we also fought against the smell that entered through the mask, it felt really toxic, the eyes burned, the smoke was so dense that I could not even see my hands. It made me overwhelmed to be in the middle of the smoke so I always tried to evade it by climbing the stones a bit. In a moment, I began to hear a lot of cough, to the point of almost hearing someone vomiting; It was a miner, who was crouched cutting sulfur stones without any protection, no mask, no cold cap, not even a jacket, he was really drowned in the clouds of sulfur. I looked around and there were about 10 or 12 miners without a gas mask working next to the toxic smoke. When it dawned many miners were already equipped with their sulfur stones in which weighted  between 70 and 90 kilos, weight that obviously exceeds theirs. Their way of taking it down is a bamboo stick with two bamboo baskets that they carry on their shoulders. They earn for this, between 4 to 8 dollars. Many choose this job because they earn more money than they would earn by doing other jobs. Without caring about what it costs for their health, because anyone does, not even the government neither the company that gives them the money for their work.

”Although the Kawah Ijen has not erupted significantly since 1936, in the last 40 years up to 74 miners have lost their lives as a result of frequent explosions that suddenly release large sulfur clouds and flares up to five meters high" (National Geographic (2018). Kawah Ijen volcano, Indonesia: blue fire.)

I believe that we can’t spend more days without doing anything about it, I know that many for many of you this is quite a foreign issue, but the conditions in which they work are really primitive, and cruel. I would like you to help me with a signature, to give these miners an opportunity to continue their work in a truly dignified way where their rights are fulfilled, such as, the right to health, right to equality before the law, prohibition of torture and the right to a dignified life.