”It was terrible having to knock on the door or window in the
middle of the night to tell the parents that their children should be
evacuated the next morning. We said it was because of the
radioactivity, which could have bad consequences for all of them.
We arranged a place for everyone to gather to be put on buses. It
was a dreadful sight.”


In a Belarussian village people are constantly working. On 26th April 1986 Natalia had been in the garden all day planting potatoes. It wasn’t until the evening that the news reached them about the accident 27 km away, but Natalia was not worried because neither she nor her family knew anything about nuclear power and they didn’t realise there was any danger.

At midnight two or three days after the accident Natalia’s colleague knocked on the door to say that all employees were to meet at the school where she worked, 10 km away. When all the teachers were assembled the director told them to go round warning people in the villages. The children were to be evacuated the next day at 6 a.m.

”My husband was a truck driver and he drove me around the villages in his truck,” Natalia remembers. ”These were the most dreadful days of my life. I get very nervous and emotional when I start talking about it. I come from Dubrovo village in Narovljanskij rajon in the Gomel region, which is 27 km away from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. I was born in what is now the zone. I grew up there, did my training there and was married there.”

During the night they managed to assemble most of the children at the assigned location. They were put on buses and driven away. Some parents would not let their children go. They felt that if they had to stay then their children should stay too. Nobody really understood the gravity of the situation. ”We had some instances where the parents came back to the buses and took their children home again. People were panicking. It was just like wartime,” Natalia remembers. ”We also evacuated pregnant women, but that was just the first evacuation. Later on the whole population was evacuated.”

Everybody from the village school was taken to Svetlogorsk, 140 km from the disaster area, and they were accommodated at a boarding school. From there people started to travel to their families in other parts of the Soviet Union. Natalia was preparing for an examination and travelled home to her parents to study. Natalia’s husband stayed with his parents over the summer in the village in the radioactive zone. He had a job as a driver with the clean-up teams and helped to transport hay and potatoes from the radioactive fields.

It was initially intended that people should keep on living in the village. Asphalt roads were constructed and a central water supply was established. But later a decision was made that everyone should move out. Natalia’s family received a residence permit until September but they moved in August when all the papers had been finalised. Until then they stayed in the radioactive area and ate vegetables from the garden. They received 250 roubles per child and 500 per adult. The house belonged to the local kolkhoz, so they could not get any compensation for it. When they moved, everything was measured for radioactivity at the control point. The furniture that was too radioactive was thrown out of the van and burnt.

It was not until October, six months after the accident, that the last of the residents were evacuated from the village. Natalia and her husband have only returned there a few times to visit the graveyard. The remains of the village are now inside the exclusion zone. Everything is overgrown and the buildings have fallen down.

It was difficult to find a new job and move on with life. Many village schools closed down and the children in the small classes were transferred to schools in the towns. Natalia got a job in a nursery school but after a while this closed down too. She applied for a job in an orphanage instead.

In order to understand what an Easter European orphanage is, one needs to visit one and even then it can be hard to grasp. The long, dark corridors, where only every third fluorescent light works, only serve to emphasise the feeling of depression flowing out of the rooms where the children are kept. In these institutions the country’s normal pedagogical principles for training and personal development appear not to apply.

It had been difficult enough for Natalia to tackle the change in her life after the Chernobyl accident, but the work with disabled children does not make it any easier. ”To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be able to work in an orphanage over a long period – two weeks, no longer,” says Natalia. ”It’s psychologically tough seeing these children all the time and being upset all the time.”

Today there are more institutionalised children in Belarus than there were after the Second World War. The strong increase in congenital deformities after the Chernobyl accident has meant an increase in the number of children going to orphanages. Partly because of families rejecting deformed children and partly because the economic situation makes it more-or-less impossible for a family to look after a sick child.

At Vesnova orphanage, where Natalia works, both mentally and physically disabled children are ’kept’. There are 15 nurses and teachers for 150 children, of whom 87 require constant care. Approximately 30% of the children come from the contaminated areas but there is no record kept of what connection their family has to the accident: where they lived when the accident occurred, whether the father helped with the clean-up operations in the exclusion zone etc. So although the manager of the orphanage is in no doubt about what Chernobyl has meant for the number of sick children he cannot provide any information about the individual children’s precise connection to Chernobyl, which makes the statistics totally unusable to begin with.

In the pursuit of good pictures and in an attempt to describe an invisible and totally incomprehensible disaster, western photographers regularly visit hospitals and orphanages in Belarus in order to visualise the otherwise invisible radioactivity. At Vesnova orphanage they actually had to limit the number of journalists visiting in the years just before the 20th anniversary of the accident. In the West, pictures of the macabre-looking children are often used to illustrate articles on Chernobyl. The pictures have become almost a symbol of the accident and are used by western humanitarian organisations to collect money for improvements at hospitals and orphanages, but they do not like to talk about this too much in Belarus. It is felt that it gives a bad and biased image of the country.

Although the government makes it difficult for foreign organisations to work in Belarus, at Vesnova orphanage they are more than happy to accept big trucks from Western Europe filled with shoes, clothes, soap, nappies and other things they need. Furthermore, they have entered into a collaboration with an Irish organisation to renovate the worn-out buildings so that the children can now lie in light and welcoming rooms. There is also an education programme for the employees.

When one works with mentally and physically disabled people one develops a professional view of heads that are three times larger than normal, legs that cannot be unfolded, tumours the size of a football and eyes that speak of a complete lack of comprehension. But when one works with this in a country with an invisible source of radioactive contamination it can nonetheless be difficult not to be personally affected and to maintain a professional facade.

The mental effect can lead to one thinking that one’s own problems are greater than they actually are. Reports from the United Nations and other international sources also describe the psychological factor as the biggest problem. Although there may be something in this, the authors of these reports have clearly not lived and worked in the country. The employees at Vesnova are in no doubt that Chernobyl has led to the many congenital deformities and mental defects, but actual evidence is not to be found in a country where there is a lack of credible statistics.

Although one can question the statistics, the few figures that everyone agrees on are, however, enough to knock even the toughest off their feet. At the time of the accident there were around 7 million people living in the contaminated areas, in Belarus, the Ukraine and Russia. Of these there were 3 million children. Today there are around 5.5 million people, of whom children constitute just over 1 million, who still live in the contaminated zones. In other words, after 20 years only around 22% have moved away, while the remaining 78% are affected by the radioactivity on a daily basis. Even a small radioactive effect can cause severe organ and brain damage in a foetus. In Belarus alone the number of heart attacks has quadrupleaccumulation of radioactive caesium in the heart muscle.

Natalia stops by a child whose legs are folded under his body and cannot be used for walking. The child needs intensive physiotherapy, but where can one start when there are 150 children in the orphanage?

Showing us the child makes Natalia think about her own family’s problems. ”My joints are painful,” she says. ”My daughter also has pains in her legs. She is 20 years old. Sometimes she cries because of the pain. She’s afraid of going to hospital. First of all she wouldn’t go to hospital and we tried every possible alternative. But in the end we had to take her there. She couldn’t lift her hand. She was given a lot of injections. It helped, but I don’t know how long it will last. The autumn is the worst time. The doctors say that the problems with our joints are directly related to the radioactivity. I spoke to a surgeon who said that it’s the same for everyone living in the Gomel region.”




About EarthVision's 20 Years 20 Lives Project.

- Meeti Grigorij Sorikov, Pensioner, Belarus
- Meet Hanna Koslova, Wife and Mother, Ukraine
- Meet Galina Bandazhevskaya, Pediatrician, Minsk, Belarus
- Meet Valentina Smolnikowa, Buda-Koshelevo, Belarus
- Meet Igor Komisarenko, Direktor of the Komisarenko Institute for Endochrinology and Metabolism, Kiev, Ukraine
- Meet Alexander Filippov, Retired School Teacher, Babichi village, Belarus
- Meet Constantine Checherov, Nuclear Physicist, Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, Russia / Slavutich, Ukraine
- Meet Danilo Vezhichanin, Mayor, the village of Yelno, Rivne Oblast, Ukraine


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Text: Mads Eskesen
Translation: Angela Heath

Photos: Mads Eskesen and Gabriala Bulisova

The story is based on interviews in 2004 and in 2005 by Marianne Barisonek and by Mads Eskesen