Tiina's father Veikko Palm drank lye (caustic soda/sodium hydroxide) when he was 3 years old in 1930. Lye is a highly corrosive substance, but it was commonly used as a household cleaning product still in the thirties in Finland. Many children accidentally drank lye because it looked like milk, and many died a horribly painful death by starvation because the lye would etch their food pipe. Some survived to tell their stories. Little Veikko survived on cream and milk for two years.
He was a sensitive boy in a time when boys were not allowed to be sensitive and that one traumatic event shaped every step of the rest of his life until his death at the age of 92, his death originally also caused by that event in 1930, as at the age of 76 he started getting pneumonias, often more than 10 per year, due to surgeries in the 1970s to replace his food pipe. |
Emilia was adopted to Finland from Sambia as a baby. She found her Sambian family in the Finnish version of the tv programme Long Lost Family.
In the project Emilia examines the themes and thoughts raised through her life journey, as well as the stories of her families in Sambia and Finland. |