Chernobyl

When I found out I was coming to Kyiv I was asked by several people if I planned to go to Chernobyl and see the site of the nuclear disaster of 1986, it is after all only two hours from Kyiv.  My answer was always the same, "No, it's not a tourist attraction, but I would like to go to the museum in Kyiv."  On Thursday evening when we had our team meeting we were asked by Oksana, our on-site logistics coordinator, what our plans were for the weekend in town since most of the team was going to Lviv.  The reason she was asking was because she had mentioned earlier in our meeting that it was going to be Kyiv Day in the City Center and we should probably avoid that area.  Hmmm.....another weekend where we can't go downtown, I'm going to have to ask if there is another "something" scheduled for next weekend, if so, I'm going to lose all my opportunity to see all the things on my "to do" list.  Well don't fret, there isn't anything planned, and well, we went downtown to check out the Kyiv Day anyway after the Chernobyl museum but that will all be covered in a separate blog.

Back to Chernobyl...when Oksana heard we were going to the museum she offered to come with us and be our guide.  Paul, Shiva, Cheryl, and I all jumped on the chance to have her join us and we invited her to bring her family with her, it was Saturday after all.  We met Oksana and her eldest son "Alex" (his name is Oleksii, but he likes to be called Alex) at the metro station and walked the few blocks to the museum.  If you weren't specifically looking for the building you'd walk right by it, it's an under-stated small two story building.  Aside from Sydney and her classmates who are reading the blog at school, we should all be aware of what happened in Chernobyl in April of 1986.  I was living in Ohio by then, had been in the States about 2.5 years, and it was a huge story in our area considering that the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station is thirty minutes away from where I was living.  If something bad happened at a nuclear plant in one country, it could happen here - that's what I thought at 16.

Oksana is a little younger then me, her son is about Tyler's age, and like me she was a student going to school, but while I was safe in Toledo, Ohio, she was here in Kyiv, not far from the Chernobyl site when disaster struck.  She shared her personal stories with us as we walked around the rooms of the museum, you can visibly see how much of a painful and personal experience that time was for her and still is.  I asked if I could share some of her experience in the blog and she said "Of course."  My first question for her was, "Do you remember where you were when this life changing event happened?" and her response to me was, "No, we didn't know at that time if was life altering, no information was being released, people weren't told anything."  It was only after a few days when International reports started coming in did those in the area learn of what happened.  She tears up as she recalls how her father waited in line at the train station for 40 hours with other fathers to purchase train tickets for their families to leave the area.  She left the next day with her mother and younger brother, he father staying behind to work - it was expected of him, and she traveled to Moscow in a packed train of women and children.  In Moscow they were scanned for radiation and while their bodies were fine, their shoes and the bottom of her long school uniform skirt were full of radiation.  She spent four months in Moscow going to school and then re-settled in Western Ukraine to finish the school year, only returning to Kyiv about a year after the event.

To describe the museum, it is somber, dark, sad, so many lives lost, so many more lives affected forever.  There are varying reports of why the disaster struck - some say it was a failed test, some say there was seismic activity in the region (which is possible given the region), it could very likely have been a combination of both, whatever the cause, the result was devastating.  As you enter the museum you see the list of towns and villages that were in the area, displayed in white - inviting, but as you leave the exhibit, you see the names black, crossed out, no longer habitable for hundreds of years to come.  It's a lesson for us all to learn, to be vigilant about our stewardship of the one Earth we all inhabit and share.  A somber, dark, deep thought, but that is what I was left with and I am grateful to have had this experience.


It was hard for me to take pictures inside the museum, I was overcome with a sense of spying on someone's privacy, taking pictures of their tragedy, but there were a few I took which really struck me.  The first is a wall full of children's pictures, they were identified as being directly affected by the Chernobyl disaster and were given a "special status" (read - needing extra care and oversight).  It is only one wall of pictures, there were four walls like this.  The other picture I would like to share is of a tree that is bearing the memories and personal items of those killed and affected by the blast, the fallen apples on the floor represent the fact that this tree no longer bears fruit.  It was a profoundly moving exhibit as you realize that this area, not far from where I am living for four weeks, is a dead zone, unable to produce or sustain anything for several hundreds of years.


Thank you Oksana for sharing this experience with me.