Vilho Kivikangas, an official Finnish hero
One year on, TIME gives Finnish humanitarian aid doctor a place on the first team
|
|
|
By Anu Nousiainen and Saska Snellman
In the spring of 2003, Helsingin Sanomat's Sunday section chose a dozen Finnish heroes who had changed the world in one way or another by fighting on the side of good.
We wished to point out to the European editors of the U.S.-based weekly magazine TIME that there are heroes to be had in Finland as well as in any other place - TIME had just selected nearly 40 "European Heroes", and not one of them was Finnish.
We were a little miffed.
So we contacted the TIME Europe desk in London and promised to send them a little list of our own making. It might be of some assistance, we thought, for the next time the magazine picks European role-models.
The 2004 European Heroes issue of TIME appeared on the newsstands last week, and there, along with 28 other worthies, is the Helsinki physician Vilho Kivikangas!
Also on the list are a number of celebs known for their charitable works, like actress and HIV/AIDS ambassador Emma Thompson and author Nick Hornby (founder of a school for autistic children), and fearless officials, like the steely chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, Carla del Ponte.
But the list also contains many names unknown to the general public, like that of the French nurse Marie Cammal, who rescues Cambodian children from the mean streets of Phnom Penh, or the Czech psychiatrist and activist Jan Pfeiffer, who campaigned tirelessly on behalf of more humane treatment for psychiatric patients in his country.
Vilho Kivikangas fits right in with this crowd.
In "Doctor Goodwill", the article written by Lydia Itoi, a TIME stringer living in Helsinki, readers are told of how Kivikangas has made around 150 trips to Russia over the past ten years, carrying antibiotics and used hospital equipment, and of how he has arranged shipments of medicines and medical equipment to Mongolia and North Korea.
There is also the less glorious story of how Finnish vice squad officers arrested Kivikangas in 1995, and of how he was hauled into court on 38 counts ranging from embezzlement and drug trafficking to illegal waste disposal, after he had carried into Russia medications that Finnish pharmacies had earmarked for disposal and destruction. Following a lengthy legal battle, the Court of Appeal threw out all the charges.
"A doctor who sees a need and the means of help has to act", Kivikangas says bluntly in the interview.
Last year, Jim Ledbetter, one of the senior editors at TIME Europe, expressed some doubts that Vilho Kivikangas would qualify as a European Hero, because the North Korean object of his assistance might not strike a suitable chord.
Ledbetter was a good deal more enthusiastic about Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system kernel and challenger of Microsoft on its own turf. Sure enough, Torvalds was up there in TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2004, published earlier this year.
So, what was it made the TIME panel eventually pick a 68-year-old Finnish doctor whom even people in Finland do not know very well?
We had pestered Ledbetter once before. It was time to send out the e-mails again.
He replies almost immediately, pointing out how impressed they had been with the utterly selfless sense of sacrifice embodied in Kivikangas's work on behalf of people in dire need.
The retired doctor's moral imperative clearly hit home hard. Kivikangas is not one who can simply shrug his shoulders and walk by on the other side. He is driven to help assuage suffering.
Clearly Doctor Goodwill's case was not weakened by the fact that he has had to show a stubborn streak, even under great duress and with a raft of charges against his name. Many would have backed off there and then, but he soldiers on quietly.
Vilho Kivikangas took onboard the TIME Europe accolade without letting it interrupt his schedule in the least. By next week he should have got ready a container-load of medicines and hospital equipment for despatch to a site in rural Iraq. The goods are piling up in his garage at home in Helsinki.
The North Korean potato project that he undertook three years ago is also proceeding under its own steam. It has been possible in the laboratory to develop a virus-resistant strain of potatoes that will produce three times the crop of the blight-ridden former plants.
Next spring the first plants will be put in the ground for seed potatoes in the North Korean countryside, and in late May or early June, the locals will be able to enjoy new potatoes.
Kivikangas's simple "potato diplomacy" has made the Koreans believe in the goodwill of the Finns. The cooperation is set to expand, when Finns begin to "rehabilitate" the central hospital in a North Korean town of 120,000 people.
Kivikangas has had heart trouble ever since a trip to Mongolia in 1995, when a bad bout of 'flu led to myocarditis. He works at his own pace, and at the same time he is trying to pass the torch and the task on to the next generation. But idealism does not take root like a seed potato.
"The will to help must always come from the individual himself or herself. If a person does not have an eye for how humanity can be helped, then it is not something you can simply plant in them."
Before he takes off on his next humanitarian aid journeys, Kivikangas's calendar will include a trip of a rather different colour: at the end of October he will travel to London to a gala reception hosted by TIME Europe, at which all 29 heroes will receive their awards.
"There were so many interesting people in that bunch, I thought I'd better go along."
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 10.10.2004
Previously in HS International Edition:
Heroes, you say? Sure, we have loads of them (6.5.2003)
Links:
TIME Europe: Vilho Kivikangas by Lydia Itoi
ANU NOUSIAINEN AND SASKA SAARIKOSKI / Helsingin Sanomat
anu.nousiainen@hs.fi, saska.saarikoski@hs.fi
|
| 12.10.2004 - THIS WEEK |
Vilho Kivikangas, an official Finnish hero
|
|
