Literature | Elina Airio wrote a horror picture about Finland, which takes inspiration from the reality of the social sector

Eastern Helsinki is covered in snow. Author Elina Airio smiles widely as he welcomes home, where he lives with his wife, three children and a cat. In the middle of December, the candles flutter shyly in the apartment.

Airio’s work day has just ended. His day job is a social worker for families with children, who visits people’s homes, talks with them on the phone or via video and offers help at any time for any problem of a family with children: a child’s sleep problems, eating challenges, defiance, neuropsychiatric disorders…

His first novel is also set in this world A woman is running in the forest (Gummerus, 2022). However, the novel is a dystopia, an exaggerated horror picture.

In the piece, a family coach comes to help Mimi with her baby and kindergarten-aged daughter. Mimi’s husband is mostly on business trips, the young mother suffers from terrible loneliness and her mental health is shaken: Mimi has, among other things, locked her children away from time to time.

A family coach has been called in to teach praise and encouragement parenting, but it soon turns out that the helper popping beta blockers is actually far too tired to help.

Read more: “What is the welfare state today” – Almost 1,000 social workers told HS about their difficult everyday life

Only a couple of days before the interview HS talked about the exhaustion of social workers. Last spring, nearly a thousand professionals responded to a survey that HS conducted last spring in cooperation with the professional organization Talentia for social professionals.

The survey asked what kind of effects the corona crisis had on the social sector. Low pay, excessive workload and lack of appreciation were repeated in the answers – and they were a problem even before the corona virus.

In Airio’s novel, the social sector is privatized, and more and more “client volume” is required of employees: more people to be coached, less time with them. At the very beginning of the work, we dive into the employee’s head:

I hated all that productivity talk. I swallowed when I had to cram more coaching meetings into the days; I buried my head in the table when the time spent in my wives’ homes was cut; I pressed my eyes deep into their sockets with my palms when I was required to complete everything that had to be entered into the electronic system during the coaching meeting.

“I made it as terrible as possible,” Airio says, and pours into the glasses the mulled wine he gets from Tuomaa’s market every year.

In Finland, social services are not, at least not yet, sources of cash flows for private companies. The terrible elements of the novel are still inspired by the reality of the social sector.

“The number of customers is increasing, colleagues are changing, processes are confusing. New employees do not have time to familiarize themselves with the challenging job description. It should be developed, but there is no time for this. You can’t meet enough customers. You don’t dare to stay on sick leave, because you know the team’s deck will fall apart in your hands. This inevitably leads to the accumulation of exhaustion”, described one of the respondents in the HS survey, and sounds almost like Airio’s book.

Of my own there was no intention to write about the field in the beginning. Airio studied writing at Kriittisnes högälä, wrote in the evenings and at night after the children went to bed. It just didn’t seem like a suitable world could be found for the script, when the author enjoyed the language: “The Finnish language is absolutely wonderful, I could immerse my head in it!” Airio declares with a laugh.

Krittinen’s teachers advised him to tie the flying language to something familiar.

That not enough has been said about the social security sector. That it would be an interesting topic for a novel.

“At one reception, the teacher said ‘why don’t you write about the fact that empathy is shit’.”

That she would write about a woman who no longer believes her own empathy will help; from a world where the starting point is that meeting people is not important. Airio tells how important it is in his work to give time for the building of a relationship of trust and empathy – and how imagining a world where they would be taken away made him calm down.

Anger inspired me to write. Before the corona, Airio wrote in the living room of the Redi shopping center in the free city, where he finally decided on the subject of his novel.

“What could be the worst that could happen”, Airio remembers thinking. “Then it somehow got really dark. I guess I’m a bit of an angry person.”

Elina Airion a golden vine twists in the kitchen, and the mother-in-law’s tongues poke on the dresser. However, there are only a few green plants, a small surprise for the reader of Airio’s novel. Houseplants play a very big role in the book: they take up more and more space in Mimi’s apartment in a nightmarish way, as an impressive image of the all-consuming nature of depression and exhaustion.

The acrid, heavy smell of soil sprouts in the clean room air, and a wet, stained lump has spread on the floor. Peat oozes from the footboards, and a few dying stems have detached from the hair of the golden vine.

The idea started from the lyre fig that grew in Red’s living room, and expanded while writing to the forest maiden of Finnish mythology. In an old fable, a maiden lures people deep, deep into the forest until they are completely lost. Then the girl turns and it is revealed that she is completely hollow from the back.

“Black was a wonderful metaphor,” says Airio. “That this is what it’s like to be a woman in this society. At the end of the day, when you’ve completed the whole damn assignment: get into nursing, stay home with the kids, go back to work, and watch the man raise tons of higher wages, is there anything left after that?”

Airio did not take his story to the forest, but brought the forest to the mother and children’s home. The plants became an enclosure created by the author, from which the characters in the novel cannot get out.

A woman is running in the forest is a dystopian horror picture, not a description of Airio’s own everyday life, the author emphasizes. He enjoys his work: his colleagues and supervisor are nice, and Airio enjoys meeting and helping people.

However, resources are scarce in the field, and the future looks increasingly threatening.

In HS’s article, social worker Merja Haverinen hoped that the decision-makers would view social care as an investment instead of an expense. The matter can also be justified with economic arguments, he stated: investing in social work would enable better assistance to be provided, which in turn would increase the possibility that clients would be able to return to working life and become tax payers.

Elina Airio agrees. He hopes that the decision-makers will have foresight, investing in the earliest services and areas that face people. In his opinion, talking about productivity in this context is often far too short-sighted.

“We’re looking at such a damn narrow piece,” Airio gasps. “We cannot look at a year or two, because if families can be successfully helped with early support and high-quality early childhood education, if there were smaller group sizes and if we had time to respond to the nepsy challenges [neuropsykiatrisiin]its return can be seen ten years from now.”

According to Airio, investments should be made in services now, employees should be trained now, wages should be increased so that work can find its creator. For example, in early childhood education and emergency services, it can be seen that this has not been successful, Airio states.

“I feel hopeless about that. That where we are going, and where we may already be.”

The challenges of early childhood education can also be seen daily in the work of a social worker for families with children, he says. Closing playgrounds, leaving small school children alone, too large group sizes and a lack of qualified workers lead to children who are not well.

“In Helsinki, the state of early childhood education is terrible,” Airio says and glances at his phone: the received message says that yet another playground has closed. In September, the city closed some of the playgrounds so that their staff could be transferred to kindergartens to make up for the lack of staff, and the closures will continue well into the springn. The closure of playgrounds affects, for example, school children’s afternoon clubs, club activities and baby family activities.

A novel at the beginning, the family coach goes to Mimi’s house for the first time. Airio says that at the beginning of his work as a social worker, he was excited about home visits: that he knows how to be respectful and consider others.

“I trust that my eyes are kind, and I’m always on the customers’ side,” he says. “But it was exciting that someone would let me come into their space.”

The book exaggerates elements that Airio himself finds frightening both as a user of social services and as an employee. As a parent of three children, he has “used all the services in the world”, but also wants to remind us that we all use social services in one way or another.

“I took advantage of what would be really disgusting as an employee to do against my own ethical understanding of work,” he describes. The meetings between the family coach, who remains nameless in the novel, and Mimi are full of haste and forms; listening to the other person is forgotten.

I can’t tell Mimi or anyone else how I sit in the work intensification teams with my stomach clenched, light green pills down my throat and fear that that very thing has already been taken away, the state of speaking.

Jump from social work to becoming a writer has been a fun and surprising class trip. Born in Nokia, Airio’s mother was a payroll accountant and his father was a taxi driver, his childhood and youth “such basic security”. Writing was a secret hobby, not a career choice.

At first, moving in literary circles aroused uncertainty, and Airio felt that he was an outsider: he did not know the topics of discussion, the works or the people. However, now he has gotten to know his colleagues, made friends.

“It has been wonderful and strange to meet people who make art, and now to move in circles where writing is making art and work. It’s a new world of thought for me.”

“I’m also happy about my own background and I don’t value them, I just look at them as different,” he adds.

Through the novel, these two worlds intertwine.

A woman is running in the forest is very close to the daily life of Airio’s day job, but the story is still fiction in every way. While writing, Airio was worried about how the book would be read when it was published, and talked about it a lot with his spouse.

The reaction of the work community was also exciting, but Airio has received “really wonderful” feedback about his novel from colleagues and supervisors.

Airio’s customers, their stories and experiences could not end up in the novel, its author decided early on. After the manuscript was finished, it was a huge task to read the text carefully and remove everything that in any way referred to one of his clients.

“I hope that it can be read as fiction – and as a criticism of privatization and efficiency,” says Elina Airio.

Elina Airio: A woman is running in the forest. Rubber. 204 pp.