Things are not going well in rural Sweden
An Iraqi-born doctor or nurse finds a job with the Swedish healthcare system. They pack their bags and go to work in a place like Gustavsfors, far away from the coastal cities of the south. There are not many health workers available to fill such positions, so the medical staffing department in Stockholm counts this is as a win.
Some of the old people who’ve spent their entire lives in these rural towns might see things differently. They’ll allow these foreigners with strange accents to take their pulse and look into their ears with auriscopes, but they’ll sit there wondering why things have changed so much. They remember the days when all the doctors were Swedish and the service faultless because everyone worked full-time. They also remember when schoolkids of all ages received free dental care without delay. Everyone had good teeth back then, not like today.
The doctor’s name might be hard to pronounce, but some of the locals feel grateful that there’s someone there to look after them. Hospitality is a way to let go of the old ways, and some, perhaps the loneliest, might even entertain the idea of a friendship with the newcomer. But then the Swedish immigration authorities make an unexpected appearance in town. They leave as quickly as they arrived and then there’ll be no doctor or nurse for a while. What should one think of this? Who is to blame? Better to shunt these questions aside and see what happens next, cut more wood for the winter and store it in shed.
Part of the problem is that people can’t live on their pensions anymore. There are too many billionaires in Stockholm who have made it their purpose to dismantle the welfare state. No one really stops working after retirement, which explains why there are so many septuagenarian carpenters in town. The plasters and insulators, the few that are left, are also old. One can’t speak with them without hearing a litany of complaints. They talk about their knees and backs. That, and the Sweden they grew up in.
Get Pablo Austin’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Things are different across the border, in Norway. But Norwegians are not always easy to get along with. They buy up land in Sweden and build summer mansions. Norway’s sanitized oil wealth keeps some people afloat this side of the border. But don’t expect everyone in town to celebrate when a couple of thirty-somethings from Oslo need help with the terrace lights and a pensioned town councilman shows up to do the electric work. He’ll crawl behind the furniture to cut blue and black cables while the owners of the house speak their strange dialect. Swedes and Norwegians might look like similar peoples to outsiders, but the grievances between them can run deep.
Probe further and the locals might share more indignities: many Swedish rural towns are not known for their castles or abbeys, that’s not what people built in the past. They built sturdy wooden mansions and stables painted falu red were people celebrated their birthdays or got married. These historic restaurants or hotels are the backdrop of the old family albums, but now the Chinese are buying them up. How on earth did they find these places? They started with the car company; now they’re moving inland and people in Stockholm don’t give a damn.
Sweden should be an easy place to govern, at least in theory. It’s an enormous country but there are just under eleven million Swedes. Eleven million plus the million plus immigrants, a number that’s often added separately. To many in rural Sweden, the number sits there on the margins uncomfortably. Is it permanent? Will it keep growing? And what will it mean for Sweden if it does? In any case, the rural healthcare jobs will dry up when everyone in town dies. The town will then die and the forest will move in. The forest or the Chinese.
*
Notable books, essays, op-eds or reportages
I am not acquainted with many people who can pay the subscription fee of the elite publishing university that is the Financial Times. Luckily, we sometimes hear about their reporting from secondary sources. A report on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the looming food crisis by Democracy Now!
Old habits die hard. I am reading another book about the French Revolution and Napoleon, by Bart Van Loo, the Dutch Roger Crowley. I love the way these popular historians work. They spend months or years reading widely and voraciously to condense everything into a work that reads more like historical fiction. The monographers in academia will not be the impressed by this, but they’re in the minority. Crowley, however, is still the master of the trade. His City of Fortune is a joy to read.
