CNN - Chernobyl: still contaminated, poor

Chernobyl 10 years later:
still contaminated, still poor

April 19, 1996
Web posted at: 11:20 p.m. EDT

From Correspondent Eileen O'Connor

MINSK, Belarus (CNN) -- Many call the Belarusian village of Gridny "rodina," meaning homeland or birthplace. It is also a place that now brings to mind death and disease. Gridny, like many other villages in this former Soviet republic, is still irradiated 10 years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in neighboring Ukraine. (1MB QuickTime movie)

The villages were evacuated and became ghost towns only a few weeks after the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl melted down. Many residents moved to larger cities. But some returned, too poor to live in cities, or too old, like Ilya and his wife Nadezhda. For them, city life was no life.

"It was like a wilderness there. Nobody liked us when they saw us. They pointed at us, calling us Chernobyl people. Was it our fault?" Ilya asked.

Now they have returned to Gridny, where they are constantly stalked by an unseen villain. One parcel of land may be declared safe by the Geiger counters, while just a few feet away, radiation levels are dangerously high.

Yevgeny Stepanchenko, a military man who guards the zone, says it is difficult to explain to residents that some areas are forbidden because of radiation. "They think that radiation should smell or something. They don't understand," he said.

So, learning to cope with the hazards of radiation has become the business of the young. Every day at School Number Two in Narovlya, students learn the dos and don'ts of radiation. Their area, too, is affected. The trouble again is that the people have no money, and little choice but to live here.

"If we were to think about it every day, life would be unbearable," said one teacher. "We are already mentally stressed."

Their stress is well founded. Children are developing some types of cancer 60 times more often than they were before the Chernobyl nuclear plant's meltdown. Dr. Reiman Ismail-Zade, a pediatric oncologist, says they are seeing only the tip of the iceberg -- and already children are dying, in part because of a lack of understanding, and also because of a lack of money.

Ismail-Zade says his group is short on drugs, antibiotics, and even some equipment. "It makes us angry," he said.

Nobody is as angry as the mothers tending to their sick children. They say they were never told of the dangers until it was too late. Oksana Gracheva, for example, is a child living in Gomel, an affected area where the children are supposed to be checked bi-annually. "No one examined me," she said. "Not ever."

Many experts fear that as the years go by, the aftereffects of Chernobyl will prove to be even worse than they are known to be today. People in these areas are fearful the world will forget their plight over the passing years and help even less.