Mama Almina and the Women Who Redrew the Line

Mama Almina and her sister-in-law, Betsina Hay, whom everyone called Mama Betsi, grew tired of that. Not in any dramatic way. Just the slow, accumulating kind of tiredness that comes from being left out of the same room, year after year. In 2010, together with a handful of other mothers in the village, they started something of their own. They called it Waifuna, meaning "blessing from God Almighty" in the local language.

It wasn't welcomed right away. Some of the men in Kapatcol saw it as a threat before they saw it as anything else. A women-led sasi group had never before existed in Papua, not once, in a tradition older than anyone could date. Waifuna pushed on regardless and eventually had its own sasi territory formally recognised by the village government, the church, and the customary elders. It was not a favour granted to them. It was a right, written down and equal to the men's.

Mama Betsi led the group at first. She passed away in 2013, and Mama Almina picked it up from there and never really set it back down.

In practice, Waifuna's work is unglamorous and precise. A reef is closed, sometimes for close to a year. When it reopens, the group counts what has returned, sea cucumbers, top shells, lobsters, and decides together where the proceeds should go. Not long ago, the harvest helped pay for the treatment of two children in the village, both dangerously underweight and both needing more than their families alone could provide. That is really the whole point. The reef feeds the decision, and the decision feeds the village.

Mama Almina has said it plainly more than once. Women belong at the forefront of protecting what is left of nature, not somewhere behind it, and that begins at home, in what a mother teaches her children before anyone else gets the chance.

We tend to talk about Raja Ampat as though it were scenery. Reef counts, karst islands, the kind of numbers that sound exaggerated until you're standing in the water looking at them yourself. What gets talked about far less is who has actually been doing the keeping, usually with no camera pointed their way and rarely anyone stopping to ask.

Tourism has brought real opportunities to Kapatcol. But ecotourism was never meant to be about arriving to consume something someone else has spent a lifetime protecting. It is meant to begin by recognising the people behind it.

Mama Almina never waited for that kind of recognition before she got started. Fifteen years later, she is still the one deciding, season by season, what the sea is ready to give back.