Services slipping ever farther from the grasp of residents in remote areas

Need cash? For the residents of Utsjoki, the nearest bank ATM is 125 kilometres away

print this

By Tapio Mainio in Utsjoki, Northern Lapland
     
      Let us start this piece with a shock to the system. How would a Helsinki mother-to-be feel if she were told that - when her contractions start in earnest - she should go to the nearest maternity hospital... at Vaskikello?
      For the benefit of those readers who have not set foot beyond Greater Helsinki’s Outer Ring Road, Vaskikello is a roadhouse/gas station/bell foundry/rest-stop on Highway 4, popular with motorists on their way to Oulu and Lapland, and it is precisely 453 kilometres north of the capital.
      The relevance of this place in our story is that if - rather than Helsinki - our mother-to-be happens to live in Utsjoki in Lapland, she will have to travel 453 kilometres to Rovaniemi to reach her nearest maternity hospital and the delivery room.
      Services in remote areas of Finland are slim already, and they are getting harder and harder to find. It offers one explanation for the Finns’ much-trumpeted "early-adopter" tag in the use of the Internet: if you don’t bank online, you might not get to the bank at all.
     
"It’s disgusting that they’ve shut down the Osuuspankki branch in Karigasniemi. Old people now have to go to the bank in Utsjoki, and that’s a 100-kilometre hike", says reindeer herder Hans-Antti Niittyvuopio, and he heads off towards the fells with fellow-herder Antti-Piera Walle.
      The two of them are mounted on their snowmobiles and are off to round up a herd of around 1,000 head of reindeer, taking them to the corral, which for some of the animals will be the last place they see.
      "Of course the bank thing doesn’t bother me that much", Niittyvuopio says with a shrug. "I surf and pay my bills directly on the Net."
     
Life and the everyday living of it is becoming increasingly difficult for people living in remote areas of Finland, as services are slipping further and further from their grasp.
      This is not a problem confined to places like Utsjoki and Karigasniemi, which are indeed about as remote as one can get in this country - it can be seen just as starkly in Eastern and Northern Finland, and in the small archipelago communities off the south coast.
      Take the example of Houtskari in the Turku Archipelago, between the mainland and the Åland Islands. Residents here must travel on no fewer than four inter-island ferries for a number of hours to reach many of the services they need regularly, all the way to Turku itself.
      The post office has gone, the pharmacist’s has gone, and the bank automat is no longer giving out notes.
     
The idea of someone in Helsinki being asked to travel 450 kilometres to deliver her child might perhaps be dismissed as a polemical statement or a one-off, a freak of geography, but how about the thought of driving to Tampere (174 km) to get a prescription for your kids when they are ill? Or popping out to Lahti (103 km) to get some cash for the weekend from the ATM?
      This is standard operating procedure if you happen to live in the rural Lapland community of Utsjoki (pop. 1,402, area 5,370 sq. km.(!), distance from Helsinki 1,267 km).
      Lauri Mäkitalo, a local Utsjoki electrician, keys in his PIN-code at the Otto ATM in Inari. In the trailer behind his car he has a load of sawn logs that are heading north and homewards.
      "I have to load my wallet up here, because the only place you can get cash in Utsjoki is from the shop check-out, and that can be a nuisance", says Mäkitalo.
      "One customer was completely dumbfounded when he ordered a taxi and told the driver to take him to the nearest ATM. After they’d been driving for half an hour or so, he tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked him where he thought he was going. The answer came back: ‘Inari, around 125 kilometres’", recalls Susanna Westerlund, a waitress at the Pohjantuli Hotel in Utsjoki.
     
There is a rumour going around that even the Inari ATM could be under threat. Not long ago the last bank in Inari, a Nordea branch, closed its doors. If the ATM goes, then the nearest one for the Utsjoki residents would recede around 50 kilometres further south, to Ivalo.
     
The trip to Ivalo is already a familiar enough one, as it is the location of the nearest doctor, at the Ivalo Health Centre. Utsjoki has not managed to secure a permanent doctor for itself. This autumn the community has struggled by, with a doctor from Ivalo visiting once a week. Some weeks it has been possible to get a locum in, and otherwise the telephone has been used.
      "We do consultations over the phone with the health clinic staff in Utsjoki. For patients here who are travelling a long way, we tend to give them their medication directly from the dispensary if the pharmacy in Ivalo happens to be closed", reports Ivalo physician Oili Hanninen.
     
"Once we had a patient here  who was recovering from a mild heart attack, and in the morning he asked for permission to go to the bank. I said it was alright, but I started to get a bit concerned when I didn’t see the old guy for several hours."
      "About ten o’clock that evening, he came back and told me he’d been on the bus to the old Postipankki branch, which is now a Sampo Bank branch, down in Sodankylä. That’s 160 kilometres south of Ivalo", says Hanninen.
     
"There is a municipal swimming hall in Utsjoki, but it is only open three days a week, in order to save money. The other days the swimming hall manager looks after a kids’ afternoon club", explains Susanna Westerlund. The local desk of KELA (the Social Insurance Institution of Finland) is also open two days - two days a month.
      Westerlund sighs and points out that people here also have to pay an additional EUR 9.00 for a small bottle of pills that is brought in on the post office bus, if they get a prescription renewed over the phone.
      "Sure, you can deal with insurance premiums and so on over the Net, but sometimes you have to go to the insurance company’s office in person, and that’s 325 kilometres away in Sodankylä", Westerlund goes on.
      The same trip northwards from Helsinki would take you past Jyväskylä and as far as Konginkangas, the location of the horrendous bus crash in March of this year. Alternatively, you could be making the trip to Varkaus (322 km), or even to the outskirts of Savonlinna (338 km).
     
Petri Ylitalo, an agent for the Pohjola Insurance Group, sits alone in the Pohjola office in Sodankylä.
      The opening hours have had to be limited, because the last permanent counter clerk here has been made redundant as a cost-saving measure.
      "You have to set aside time for paperwork, too", explains Ylitalo.
     
"Access to services is becoming more and more selective", says Professor Asko Suikkanen, of the Department of Social Studies at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi.
      He refers to a kind of "streaming" process, in which some fortunate individuals reap the benefits of recent developments, while others look on enviously.
      "At some of the ski-resorts in Lapland, for instance Levi [near Kittilä], you can find more services than you might expect to see in a medium-sized city. On the other hand, services are being dismantled at a brisk pace in far-flung communities. The new network technology and remote automated services, and the merging of private sector and public sector services, they have not been tested and developed adequately. The way things are now, the services are inflexible", says Suikkanen.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 19.12.2004

More on this subject:
 Where have all the services gone?
 FACTFILE: Utsjoki
 The last sports store in Pello shuts its doors

TAPIO MAINIO / Helsingin Sanomat
tapio.mainio@hs.fi