1975 Kittilä
The promised land
My first visit to a refugee reception centre was like a trip to an exotic suburb. The centre was quite isolated, and there were no pelargoniums or violas in the construction site. It seemed strange that people were packed into class rooms for months, even years, to wait for their turn to go somewhere. A community had formed inside the brick walls, a microcosm with its own rules. The children were playing amid the hodgepodge of cultures. They were trying to cope in their own way, while the adults tried to make do every which way they could. The only thing common to all of them was the wish to remain in this country.
Overall, I visited the centre five times. I took pictures of the children in different costumes, then sent them the pictures and took some more. I came to realize that I had no special acting skills and that my body language is not very artful. During my last visits, I spent hours alone in empty rooms, taking copies and colouring the tables onto which the residents had portrayed scenes from their lives in the centre. The children I knew waved at me and showed me their toys from behind a glass pane. The parents of one child had locked the door to their room, and the children were trying to think of something to do. There was no playground, and the play room remained closed until an instructor with a red cross came and opened the doors, which happened twice a week. In other words, there were many closed doors and a lady who was colouring in gray.
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