I was in the field again Tuesday and Wednesday, visiting some CRDP youth centers. American photographer Michael Forster Rothbart tagged along for the trip, as he is working on a documentary photo project on people affected by radiation in the former Soviet Union, and as such is particularly interested in meeting and talking with re-settled people from Chornobyl-affected areas. We were able to include a number of interesting stops in our trip, not just interesting for him, but for me as well.
For our drive to Korosten, I opted to take a longer route that goes through a little “bubble” of the Exclusion Zone, an area not originally designated as Exclusion Zone but which was recognized as pretty damn contaminated about a year or two after the accident. Unfortunately, before they realized it was unsafe for human settlements, the authorities had already built a new village for people resettled out of the original Exclusion Zone. People moved into the brand new apartments, and a few months later were evacuated a second time. You can drive through this area on the road from Ivankiv to Ovruch, with checkpoints as you go in and out of the area, and some monitoring of the road inside. It’s interesting to drive through the village, as I’ve done several time, but Michael was disappointed to learn that you aren’t allowed to stop or get out of your car while in the Zone.
His sharp eyes noticed an abandoned village just outside the Exclusion Zone, though. Although I’ve driven on that road several times, I never noticed the empty buildings hidden behind the overgrowth, just a few yards from the road. We stopped and spent about 45 minutes wandering through the village. We both commented how it was kind of eerie, especially the farther you got from the main road. Just a few hundred feet down the former road into the village, you already can’t see the main road through the thick bushes and tall grasses. I felt very sad walking around, looking at the crumbling walls, thinking of everything that people lost after Chornobyl. Not just their material possessions, but their homes, their communities, their relationships with neighbors, their classmates, their pets, their gardens, the night sky over their backyards, the parks, the sense of belonging somewhere.
At first I felt only the loss of the place, sensed the absence of life. But then I started to notice the beautiful songs of the birds. And I saw the green shoots sprouting up through the soil, the buds on the trees, and the flowers about to bloom. I was startled when I heard something rustling in the leaves at my feet, and I saw a tiny bright green frog. Later I saw another one in another part of the village. Life was all around me. Maybe there is even more life in that empty village today preciously because there are no humans.
Wednesday morning we went to Korosten School No. 13 to see and photograph some trainings conducted by the staff from the Korosten Center for Social-Psychological Rehabilitation of the Population Affected by Chornobyl (a mouthful of a name, I know). There are five of these centers in Chornobyl-affected areas of Ukraine – Slavutych, Borodyanka, Ivankiv, Korosten, and Boyarka. The Korosten staff were conducting healthy-lifestyle trainings in many of the town schools with support from a grant from Friends of Chernobyl Centers, U.S. (FOCCUS). For third and fourth graders, the topic was anti-smoking; for sixth and seventh graders, anti-drugs; and for tenth and eleventh grade girls, sex education, including a discussion about abortion. I half-jokingly made a comment that the girls don’t get pregnant without the boys, but they didn’t follow my suggestion of including the boys in the sex ed discussion. The 45-minute sessions were pretty interesting (to me at least, although the kids seemed fairly engaged, too).
After the school, we stopped by the Stalin-era bunkers that I had first toured last October. We didn’t have much time so our tour was rather brief, but I could definitely see they’ve been working hard at renovating the bunker and are expanding the collection it contains of various war and Stalin-era memorabilia. It is well on its way to being an excellent museum.
Our next stop was at the local Radiation Control Laboratory. There wasn’t really anything for Michael to photograph, but we had a very interesting conversation with the lab director. He told us that there used to be a radiation check-point right at the town market, as well as separate laboratories for the town of Korosten and one for the rest of the raiyon. Funding has decreased, though, along with public interest in checking radiation levels in food, and the number of checkpoints has been reduced. Now this one laboratory serves the entire raiyon as well as the town. However, most of the food production places, like the bread bakeries and the dairies, still have their own on-site radiation control personnel. He told us that mostly the contaminated foodstuffs today are forest mushrooms and berries, milk from privately-owned cows, and game meat. Hunters sometimes bring in their catch to be checked, and it can be clean or terribly terribly contaminated. The milk from dairies is safe, he assured us, as it is carefully controlled, but cows kept by villagers still tend to have contaminated milk.
From Korosten we headed to Brusyliv, a town and raiyon that is considered “clean” but CRDP operates there because of the very high percentage of re-settled people in the raiyon. We met the head of the local chapter of the Chornobyl Union, a national organization of people affected by Chornobyl. She told us about the upcoming march and rally in Kyiv, an annual event held on the weekend before the Chornobyl anniversary (April 26), and that this year they would again be protesting the decrease in funding for Chornobylites and Chornobyl issues. She rattled off statistics of how many people are designated Chornobyl-affected in her raiyon, how many invalids of the different categories there are, etc. She described a 14-year old girl in a nearby village as having some kind of debilitating mental and physical disability. I tried to gently inquire why this girl, born 7 years after the Chornobyl accident in a “clean” village has official “Chornobyl-affected” status. Because every child born to a resettled parent, anywhere in the country, receives the designation until they are 18 years old, I was told. This girl’s parents had been evacuated from inside the Exclusion Zone.
What is the benefit of designating every single child of Chornobylites as Chornobyl-affected, regardless of whether or not they have any kind of illness at all? And if the kid really does have some illness or disease that is related to Chornobyl, why are they Chornobyl-invalids only until they are 18? For how many generations will this go on? And why is a person Chornobyl-affected if they were re-located but don’t have any Chornobyl-related illness? Yes, having to move was traumatic and difficult, but who’s to say that without Chornobyl some of those people wouldn’t have moved anyway? The break-up of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic depression has pushed people to leave rural villages in droves, many even to leave the country, yet the millions of people resettled after the Chornobyl accident receive various social benefits in perpetuity. The policies of social benefits for Chornobylites, if they were actually implemented as they were intended to be, would bankrupt this country. But if they’re not going to really implement the policies honestly, what’s the point in having them at all? As usual, the more I learn about Chornobyl, the more questions I have.
We next visited the village of Privorotye, about 20 minutes from Brusyliv, and met with a group of resettlers and their children who were rehearsing for a Chornobyl anniversary concert. We spoke with a woman who had been mayor of her village in Narodychi raiyon, one of the most affected parts of Ukraine. She described how her entire village was relocated together, all 400-some people were moved to Privorotye in 1989. She told us how warmly they were received by the local residents, and how over the past 17 years her village has completely integrated into their new community – people have intermarried, they’ve had children, and no one anymore thinks of people as “re-settled” or “native”. She told us, with justifiable pride, that not a single person who relocated with them has moved away. This really struck me, as I have read many accounts of people being so homesick or feeling so out-of-place in their new town that they want to move back to their abandoned village – which several hundred people have done, choosing to live in the Exclusion Zone instead of trying to adapt to life in a different, safe, place. I suspect the fact that the entire village moved together was a key factor in the resettlers’ acceptance of their new life and being able to adapt and integrate. Instead of being isolated as the only resettler, or one of just a few resettlers, in a new village, this group of people had everyone familiar around them, even if they lost everything familiar.
Anka in Kyiv 