Cousin-hunting in Scandinavia

by Mary Wilhelmine Williams

As we journeyed north, the country became more rugged, and the forests grander. The painted board houses gave way to a considerable extent to rough-hewn log ones, and the people took on a more back-woodsy, mountaineer appearance. Among the forest homes I saw several women who were both barefooted and bareheaded. They were at work under the pale slant rays of the Northern sun and seemed perfectly healthy and happy.

While I am dwelling near Sweden’s broad northern frontier, I wish to digress sufficiently to tell you what I recently learned of the work-cottages of Norrbotten, the most northern province of Sweden. These cottages originated in a threatened famine in the region, due to failure of crops, in 1902. The people of the isolated district called upon their neighbors to the south for help; and they did not call in vain. Even Swedes living in America contributed to the relief work; and, thanks to the far-extending railroads, food reached the starving people in time. In the remotest and most seriously afflicted parishes temporary homes were established for the feeding of more than four hundred children. After all danger of starvation had passed, the leaders in the relief work came to see that such children’s homes were a continual need in the region. Dirt and disease, indifference and ignorance, had long ruled in the far-northern land. This state of affairs was a result of the isolation and the depressing effect of the long, dark, cold winters, as well as of the lack of educational facilities; for in this bleak, sparsely-populated territory the regular compulsory education laws cannot be enforced.

Partly through private benevolence, partly through State contribution, the work-cottages, now eight in number, were put upon a permanent basis. And there they are now, engaged in a splendid work. They are educational institutions of the first order—doing for the backward frontiers people what the settlement houses do for the slum in the American city—and more. The needy children remain at the work-cottages for nine months of the year for a period of four or five years, during which time they undergo a transforming process. They are taught personal cleanliness and orderliness, and love and patience and self-control; they are taught to work with their hands and to think with their heads. And when their course is finished, they return to their homes and bring the salvation of intelligence to dark places. More than half of the children thus befriended are Lapps, and speak the Lapp tongue; but they learn Swedish in the work-cottages. For the more nomadic Lapps, Norway, as well as Sweden, has provided ambulatory schools which migrate from camp to camp with the pupils.

Thus Scandinavia is doing for her remote Northern population, both Mongolian and white, a work such as we should be engaged in in the interest of the mountain whites and the Negroes of our Southern States.

At Kilafors, where I changed trains for Söderhamn on the coast to the east, it was necessary to wait two hours. Kilafors is tiny but interesting. The great dark trees press in on every side so closely as to give the little village the appearance of having been made to order and lowered with derricks into a deep hole cut in the forest to receive it. When we reached Kilafors it was well past noon, and, as there was no dining car on the freight train, I was about starved upon arriving. There seemed to be but one eating house in the place, and that was a large wooden hotel, already closed, as it was past the hour for the noon meal. Hope sprang again, however, when I saw a plain little bakery sign up the trail-like street, and I lost no time in reaching it. Swedish bakeries—at least country ones—are arranged rear part before, the work room opening upon the street and the salesroom being at the back, where the wares are mostly stored away in boxes, and not displayed in show-cases, as in the United States.

I bought some nice little cakes and some zwieback, and when I had paid for my purchases, the bakerman, his curiosity evidently roused by my bad Swedish and my foreign appearance, asked whether I was a Russian.

I promptly replied that I was not.

Was I a German, then, he asked.

I replied more promptly and more emphatically that I was not a German. Then, as his repertoire of possible nationalities seemed to be exhausted, I volunteered the information that I was an American.

His face lit up with vivid interest. “Ja så!” he exclaimed. (“Ja så,” is an interjection employed by Scandinavians to express almost the whole range of emotion.)