When I was a teenager, in the 80s, several girls would get together, we would look for a driver and we could go out to party, meet people and have fun. We also organized a market every summer, children and adults participated and it was quite an event.”
Marit Kapla spent her childhood in the small village of Osebol, a remote town located in the Swedish province of Skåne. Little by little he outgrew it: “I wanted to leave, because I wanted to go to the movies, the theater, enjoy life in the city.” Ella Kapla now lives in Gothenburg and is a writer. Like her, many of Osebol's inhabitants dispersed throughout Sweden's large urban centers.
Osebol is still in the same place, but it has somehow gotten smaller. The only store he had has already closed. The school, located four kilometers away, only welcomes children up to 11 years old. There is no cinema, supermarket, bar or restaurant and no ATM. 40 adults and between 10 and 15 children now live in Osebol.
Kapla returned to the town of his happy childhood in 2016 and for two years interviewed almost everyone in the town. She let them talk, tell their stories, pour out their memories, convey their feelings. And he poured all that material without filters or restrictions into Osebol (Captain Swing), an essential book to understand the emptied Sweden, which has a lot to do with the emptied Spain and with the rural world that is becoming desertified in many countries, because “this It is a global phenomenon.”
What do the people of Osebol do? “The majority of the inhabitants are retired. There are people who are in charge of taking care of the elderly and a preschool teacher. A man has an excavator and works with it and some make a living from tourism as outdoor activity guides. There are not many jobs in the town. There was a refugee camp from Syria and Afghanistan in 2016, but most of them moved because it is not easy to find work here.”
How do they have fun? “Hunting and fishing are two of the great distractions in the area. You can also visit friends to have a wine and, if you know how to drive, it is possible to go out to dinner because 40 kilometers away there are other towns with restaurants of all kinds. There are also people who like to stay home and not see so many people.”
Osebul is light years away from Stockholm in terms of employment and leisure offerings, but Kapla claims the importance of the rural world: “Cities need the countryside, because in the event of a crisis or war, for example, each country would have to maintain itself with own food and, right now, Sweden does not have enough production to be self-sufficient.”
Kapla left Osebol and will not return, although she spends seasons, but she is a staunch defender of country life and is convinced that “it has a future because it offers quality of life and food self-sufficiency.” “I interviewed the inhabitants of Osebol before the pandemic, now, teleworking has begun to become widespread and that may be a factor for these towns that have become desertified to revive again,” he points out and concludes: “There is one thing very clear that I must emphasize, all the inhabitants of Osebol are happy to live there.”
