My friend lives across the road from an old elementary school. Across the yard from the school is a wooden building which was originally a teachers’ dormitory, but is now the home of six families. In the basement of said old house is our scout patrol’s second meeting place, called Morkku.
Or rather, was. Last night, at 1 am, I got a text message from my friend. “News for you: the house in which Morkku is has been burning for about two hours now. It originated in the attic, but now the two top floors are completely engulfed in flames.”
I just got back from the site. The building is still standing, but in very frail condition, and will probably collapse soon; if not, it will be torn down as soon as possible. The attic and second floor are completely destroyed; the first floor and the basement have suffered major water and smoke damage.
This sort of thing just seems so surreal. I mean, I never would have imagined anything like this. I feel so sorry for the families who woke up in a panic at 11 pm and had to drag themselves and their possessions out into the -7*C snowy windy winter weather. And I feel really sorry for us. We have another meeting place in the church next door, but there’s no way we can fit all of the groups there.
Luckily no-one was killed, and we had just recently moved all our equipment (tents, cookers, stoves etc.) into a locked storage room at the church meeting place.
Our troop is girl scouts. We have about 130 members right now.
“Morkku” doesn’t actually mean anything, except in the Tampere dialect (Tampere is a city in Helsinki), in which it means “a dilapitated building”. Heh… sadly accurate now…
I don’t think it made news yet… It’ll probably be in the local paper or something, but not more.
Sorry about your loss of a meeting place, but I have to correct your geographical confusion (you are not a native Finn I hope?)
Tampere is certainly not a part of Helsinki, but a separate city north of it. You might say it’s akin to saying New York is a suburb of Washington DC. As a proud tamperelainen I must take offence at this silly notion! “Morkku” in an unknown word to me, but I think it too is of Helsinki origins. Closest to your definition of the word that comes to my mind is “mörskä”, a ramschakle building.
The local newspaper Helsingin Sanomat can be found
in English at http://www.helsinki-hs.net/ , but there doesen’t seem to be a “breaking news” section.
