BOISE -- Despite a difficult language barrier, a refugee sprang into action to protect her neighbors last week.
She saw smoke coming from a nearby apartment and ran to notify her property manager. Mwamini Amuri is now being hailed as a heroine.
Amuri knows very little English, but fortunately she knows the word fire - a word that potentially led to her apartment complex being saved from damage, and her neighbors saved from getting hurt.
Through an interpreter, she tells us she was just getting home from work when she saw smoke coming from a few apartments over.
"I went to the door of my neighbor and I started knocking and knocking, knocking very hard but the person was not opening the door. Then I started asking myself 'what am I going to do?' because I was seeing the smoking crazy so I had to run very fast to the office to see if the manager was still there," Amuri said through International Rescue Committee interpreter Pascal Sabimina.
Mwamini tells us she was frantic and yelling "moto!" (Swahili for fire) and "fire, fire, fire!"
"Because I was not able to communicate everything in English I asked her to give me a pen and paper and I had to write the door number of the house where the fire was," Mwamini said through the interpreter. "I was so much worried and I was full of fear because I thought the house was going to get burnt."
Through the thick language barrier, her property manager listened to her and took her warning to heart; she ran to the unit Mwamini wrote down, where she saw a small amount of smoke. The property manager, who wishes to remain anonymous, called first responders because she suspected a fire might be inside the wall.
"There was a little bit of smoke in the apartment and what had happened was a bird had built its nest inside of the vent hood piping," Boise Fire Department Battalion Chief Tom Lovell told KTVB, "and they hadn't used it for a long time and I guess the maintenance man was putting a new fuse in and started it up and it ended up catching the bird nest on fire. It went out quickly though and so nobody got hurt
On Wednesday, a KTVB crew was there as Lovell met Mwamini and thanked her for calling attention to what could have been a bad situation.
"We're very glad that you called. That you saw something happening, that you saw smoke or whatever you saw and you went and notified the building manager and they listened to what you had to say, went over and then activated 911 and we were able to respond out and make sure the fire didn't get any bigger than it actually did," he told Amuri.
She responded through Pascal: "I also appreciate you because you were very fast to come to the rescue in the time of the fire."
Through the International Rescue Committee, she was also presented a gift from her property manager. It was a basket filled with lotion, scarves and other goodies for her and her daughters.
IRC also read a letter on behalf of the property manager, with words of appreciation. IRC Community Engagement Specialist Megan Schwab read it aloud and Pascal translated in Swahili:
"She says 'In a world where it is more important than ever to say something if you see something, Mwamini did exactly that. Her keen instinct and swift action resulted in heroism that could have meant the difference of several lives. Mwamini jumped into action by immediately notifying her property manager who could not have viewed the incident from the office.
"Her selfless act resulted in the ability for her community to step into immediate emergency action that saved valuable time and resulted in very little damage. Mwamimi is a true heroine.'"
Mwamini thanked the IRC multiple times, her property manager and, most of all, God because her neighbor ended being inside the apartment and finally answering the door.
"I thank God because what I did I didn't know that I was saving a life even inside. I knew I was just saving the house. But after some time I saw the person coming outside so I thank God very much because I managed to save this person," she said. "I did this not knowing I was doing something very important and then doing something important to my neighbors."
While flames were out when fire crews got on scene, Lovell says her call for help still could have prevented something else inside the apartment from catching fire.
"You never know what can happen with some of those older apartments; if something stirred for a long time, if it ended up falling down inside and onto the stove and could have caught something else on fire. We appreciate them calling us quickly, making sure we got out there and were able to check and investigate and find out what the problem was," Lovell added.