Doctor Goodwill

“Am I a bad man?” Dr. Vilho Kivikangas asked the Russian border guard who, on a wintry day in 1995, stopped his truckload of surplus medications bound for empty hospital shelves in northwestern Russia. The guard took a long look and waved the good doctor through. Kivikangas’ big, open face inspires such confidence. He has entered Russia 150 times over 10 years, hauling life-saving antibiotics and used hospital equipment from Finland. “A doctor who sees a need and the means of help has to act,” he says. “Russia is Finland’s neighbor, and we should help.”

As development aid chairman of Fida International, the Finnish Christian relief agency, Kivikangas, 68, has helped countless needy people. He has seen Mongolian doctors write useless prescriptions for medications that weren’t available, and North Korean nurses rig up old beer bottles to provide crude IV drips for dying flood victims. And when he sees the problem, he does something about it. “It is a crime against humanity,” he says, “to see and not to act.”

His latest places of action are Iraq, where he is shipping more medical aid, and North Korea, where 40% of children are malnourished and 70% of workers’ households lack basic daily nutritional requirements. In 1999, when the regime decided to plant potatoes after a decade of rice-crop failures, it asked Scandinavian nongovernmental organizations for help. After three years, the potato harvest of the 900 farming families in the agricultural collective of Sinchon, 85 km south of the Chinese border, has jumped 250%. Yet at home his good deeds have aroused suspicion. In 1995, the vice squad searched his garage and arrested him on 38 counts of embezzlement, drug smuggling, concealment of illegally obtained goods and illegal waste disposal. After a two-year legal battle, Kivikangas was cleared and all charges were dropped. “They prosecuted him when they should have awarded him a medal,” says lawyer and human-rights activist Matti Wuori, who defended him. Now the medals are coming. Earlier this year, Kivikangas was granted an honorary title from the Finnish President for his medical and humanitarian work. But that recognition is small potatoes compared to the praise of an anonymous North Korean official: “He is like a father; you can talk to him without reserve. There is nothing impossible for him because he makes things possible.”