The Villages in Finland Refuse to Die - Village action movement against maldevelopment

written by Hilkka Pietilф

Introduction

In 1992 the Finnish Village Action movement was awarded the "Alternative Nobel Prize" by the Right Livelihood Foundation "for showing that there is a dynamic, life-enhancing alternative to the rural decline, centralization and popular disempowerment ... the Finnish village action movement not only provides a vital lesson for the countries of Europe, but also a powerful evidence to the Third World that viable, vibrant village life is not inconsistent with development".

The movement started spontaneously in the early 1970s in various parts of rural Finland. It is a manifestation of the endless creativeness and rich-ness of ideas generated by people in the villages to regain control over their lives. The village action movement is the biggest authentic people's move-ment today in Finland. The relative number of village committees is highest in Lapland, the most peripheral province with the sparsest population.

But did not villages as active communities vanish a long time ago in an industrialized, urbanized country like Finland? Finnish villages refused to die. The number of people directly involved in runing the week-to-week activities in the villages is about 30 000 and their work has an impact on life and conditions of about half a million people in rural Finland. There are five million people in Finland today.

Rapid transformation of the society

In the 1930s and the 1940s Finland was still primarily an agrarian country. The industriali-ation process took place very rapidly after the war 1939-44 at the end of the 1940s and in the 1950s. War indemnities and reconstruction of the country speeded up the process, in fact they forced Finland to industrialize.

Finland lost the densely populated south-eastern province of Karelia to the Soviet in the war, and its population of about 400 000 people moved into the remaining part of the country. The majority of these people were farmers, and they were settled in the countryside to live again by farming. No refugee camps were ever established in Finland during those years. An extensive land reform was carried out.

At the end of the 60Дs there was a great surplus population in the countryside, which amounted to unemployment, migration to the urban areas in Finland and to Sweden in great numbers.

Rapid, intensive industrialization causes deprivation of rural life, erosion of social structures and uprooting of the people from their culture and traditions. People are left at the mercy of labor markets and impersonal public services, and the whole culture changes.

Deprivation in the villages

The prevailing atmosphere in the country was the idealisation of industrialism and the material values in life. The life style of the cities was presented as modern and fashionable, farming was taken as old-fashioned and backward. Mass media, movies, even text books and attitudes of teaching in schools prepared the youth to move into business and industry. The growing industries needed labour.

In the villages it was particularly disheartening that often the co-operative shops were the ones to close first, on the orders of their headquarters. The villagers themselves had once started these co-operatives. Schools and post offices were closed. These factors were signals of death to many villages. For too long the villagers had been waiting for action by the state and central administration - now they took their fate into their own hands.

The first committees were established in 1971-75. Then the movement spread rapidly. In 1980 the number of committees exceeded 1000. By 1985 another thousand committees had been started. The peak has probably been achieved now, the number of committees is about 3000.

Two main general aims can be traced in the activities of most villages:

* to stop the migration from the village by making it an attractive, socially rewarding and cosy place to live,

* to tempt and persuade new people to settle in the village.

A general problem in all villages is the lack of money. But there are skilful and motivated people. Thus they have reactivated an old Finnish tradition of voluntary teamwork, called talkoot. People have devoted millions of hours of work for their common good without pay.

Their reward is the completed task and the pleasure of doing it together. The best ground for good human relations is working together for a common goal. This as such is already a way of creating a feeling of community and belonging among the people living in one village. "Earlier we hardly knew each other in the village, but now we are all friends".

The village committees received very little financial support from the municipalities or the state. On the contrary, sometimes their actions have been so successful that they have donated the product of their work to the municipality - e.g. a ready made lighting system for the village road on the condition that the municipality provide the electricity for it!

Kuustenlatva - a village of 'top-people'

One of the early village committees is in Kuustenlatva in the periphery of the periphery, a village of former tenant peasants in the Western Finland forests. They lost their village school in 1974, which alarmed them to start village action in 1975. The community has only about 100 inhabitants.

They could not save the school any more, but they restored the building into a cosy Village House for meetings and festivities as well as three flats for rent for new villagers to settle in. In fact, they had to build the house twice: It was burnt by a fire right after the first renovation.

They also struggled hard to keep the village shop. For several years it looked as if it would survive. The shopkeeper even built a house in the village. The village committee organized a log-talkoot, where the forest owners donated several logs each for the shopkeeper to build the house. However, the shopkeeper felt that the shop did not provide enough and closed the business. The villagers did not give up, but started a market selling products of their own in the building. This activity is now flourishing particularly during the summer season.

One of the long-time dreams of the villagers was fulfilled in 1990 as part of the 15th anniversary celebration of the village committee. It is the Village Home of three buildings with six flats and service premises, where people of different ages and occupations can live together. The tradition of helping one's neighbour has been revived, children play in the courtyard under the supervision of the elderly. It has become a new village center, together with the Village House nearby.

During the years of hardship, the people in Kuustenlatva developed their own "Latva-kansa" (top-people) culture, drawing on their sense of humour to overcome depression and resist the entertainment industry. This culture expresses itself in all the festivities of the village, e.g. they organize mockery competitions in order to ridicule the competition enthusiasts. They often invite other villages to participate in these events.

Their original local culture has also found an expression in the two volumes of "The Vicissitudes of Top-people", which have been published. (For obvious reasons not available in English!)

As a result the village is well alive, seventeen years after the alarming signals of death. During these years the village has also brought so much positive publicity to the whole municipality that it has become more favorable to the aspirations and wishes of the villagers.

Welcoming the new and blessing the old inhabitants

Villagers have an endless supply of ideas for inviting new inhabitants to settle in their villages. Some villages bought land and built - or persuaded the municipality to build - the infrastructure, and then sold it at a nominal price - like 1 FIM / m2 - as sites for newcomers to build houses for their families.

They have written letters to those who have moved away from the village or who have relatives or roots there inviting them to return. And through "talkoot" the villagers have worked enormously to improve the roads and lighting, build sports grounds, jogging and skiing tracks, and to maintain the shops, schools, post offices, banks and other services.

Many villages have ridiculed the calculations of school authorities about the future numbers of pupils. In Kuorevaara the calculations said that the school would be closed by 1990 due to lack of children. As a result of the efforts of the village committee, there were 45 pupils that autumn and they got an extra teacher for the school.

An increasingly common feature of village activity is to pay more attention to the elderly.

In Eskola village they first started to provide meals and various activities for the elderly in the Village House. Then they built a new day care center next to it. The catering for the elderly and the day-care children is now combined. The old people of Eskola now prefer to stay in the village and no longer increase the number of clients in the municipal old age home in the main village. They have revived both mentally and physically.

Another village committee decided "that senior citizens are a resource" and organized 'days of pleasure' for them twice a month at the old village school. The program of the day consisted of a tasty meal prepared by women of the village, pedicure, massage and the like. But the highlight of the day was always a singing and playing session together with the children of the school and others in the village. This has become so important a factor in the life of the village that the municipality has decided to retain the school, which was about to be closed.

ADP and banking come to villages

Automatic data processing is the kind of new technology which divides people into two categories. A few devoted supporters of the village action have brought ADP in and implemented it in a number of villages in ap-propriate ways.

Dr. Tarja Cronberg - a technology researcher herself - proposed to the village committee of Ruvaslahti in Eastern Finland that a tele-cottage project be started in the Village House, and it begun in cooperation with the local Adult Education Centre in 1986. A year later, a similar scheme was introduced in the northern part of the country, inspired by Sweden.

Now, in 1993, there are about fifty operating tele-cottages in Finland, and quite a number of them are run in cooperation with the village com-mittees. As with all the local initiatives, the tele-cottages have very different tasks in different places. But one of the primary aims is to provide training for rural people in the skills of ADP technology and adapt it to their needs.

The tele-cottages and ADP technology also give opportunities to create new jobs in the form of so-called remote or distant work: bookkeeping, statistics, word processing etc. In the villages, information technology is applied for example in farming; communication between the municipal personnel and villagers; associations use it for updating their registers and preparing their leaflets and bulletins.

The Ruvaslahti tele-cottage has recently become a National Service Center for the villages of the whole country.

Another initiative of a village committee is the plan of Bosund village on the western coast of Finland to start its own bank. It is well known that in Third World countries women in particular have successfully established their own banks and credit associations. At a time of financial upheaval and discrediting of the big banks in the Northern countries, the people in the village of Bosund lost their confidence in them to the extent that they decided to set up a bank of their own. The process is not finished yet, but they are very determined.

Lapland - a "Third World" in Finland

Lapland has always found itself at the periphery, and is the most exploited part of the country. It has been used as the provider of raw materials - particularly hydroelectric power and timber - for the economic growth and wealth in southern Finland. It is the most active part in Finland in village action.

The valley of the Vuotos river is a case in point exemplifying the national policies on Lapland. For thirty years there has been a plan of making it a water reservoir for hydro-electricity production. People in the valley have been kept in uncertainty of the future of their homes and the villages. In 1982 Parliament decided that the plan would be definitely cancelled, and about 30 million FIM were allocated to develop the villages. In spring 1991 the government re-opened the discussion and condemned the people to uncertainty once again.

In Lapland the village committees started first to organize themselves. Until 1990 there was no national organization to bring the village commit-tees together and represent their views on the national level. At the beginning of 1990, however, a Province Council of the village committees in Lapland was established. There are about 320 village committees in Lapland. The Council con-sists of eleven representatives elected by the villages to coordinate their work and to represent them in the official bodies of the state and province.

Similar organizations have then been initiated also in a few other provinces of the country. The state and municipality officials discourage the village people from establishing their own organization.

Culture as the ground of dignity

Wherever people are seriously curtailed and squeezed they resort to their own culture and traditions, in Finnish villages as well as elsewhere. So it is not by accident that culture has been a strong element in all village activities from the beginning of the movement. The village committees have made an immeasurable contribution during these years to preserve and collect heritage and traditions of popular culture in Finland.

In many places they have been particularly active in restoring traditional methods of work and tools, traditions related to livelihood and providing for everyday needs. They have restored old buildings, revived handicrafts and traditional chores in farming, organized demonstrations. These performances are often filmed or videotaped and TV-programmes made about them, so they will be kept for the coming generations to see.

Finns love to play theater

Strong cultural feature in Finland is the enthusiasm for amateur theater. Almost every fourth of village committees has their own theater in summer time. The plays are often written locally and based on familiar charact-ers and events. The whole village gets involved in preparing the show. With the profit they e.g. buy land for housing newcomers.

The urban administrators and "advisers" are often unable see the importance of culture for the village people. They take it often as concervatism, or as plain entertainment. They are only concern-ed with the economic progress in the villages.

The role of villages in the future?

Village Action is a reaction against the development that sees progress only in economic and material terms, and directs all its efforts towards continuous growth through industrialiation and commercialization, without respect to social and cultural values of life nor ecology.

Nobody has assessed the impact of this movement in Finland these years. But how many more people would have left the countryside if the Village Action had not emerged? How many of those villages now inhabited by optimistic and self-confident people, would be empty and dead today? And how much worse would be the problems of unemployment and shortage of housing in the cities?

One thing is clear, however: The social structure of Finland would be significantly different today without this movement. Village Action movement has not only slowed down the migration of people from the villages but also created a return flow to the villages.

Families move back to countryside in order to provide a better environment and small schools for their children. Many people take early retirement and decide to move back to the countryside. Villages in the neighbourhood of urban centers receive inhabitants who prefer living in village environment though they work in the cities.

The enormous work of village committees in collecting and preserving the rich heritage of authentic Finnish popular culture is not done just to fill the museums and archives, but to cherish the genuine roots of the people and help them to regain dignity and self-confidence, which has always been so charact-eristic to the independent country pople in Finland and other Nordic countries.

At the moment the future is gloomy, for villages, the country and the whole culture. The business mentality and reliance on market forces are strengthening more than ever. It is not promising for the values of human dignity and reverence of life and nature.

In 1995 the Finnish Village Action movement was given a Communities Award, one of five in the world, by the Friends of the United Nations to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the organi-sation. Altogether there are ten categories for the Cultural Development and Reconstruction of the Communities and each receives five awards.