MoldovAnn

Not my travels this time, but my brother’s post about their day in the Exclusion Zone.

Some cool O-H-I-O photos made in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, with Dick Korn, Madeleine Trichel, Carina Silfverduk, Scott Merrill, and Bill Merrill.

http://www.osu.edu/O-H-I-O/?item=1979
http://www.osu.edu/O-H-I-O/?item=1975
http://www.osu.edu/O-H-I-O/?item=1977

Read the announcement here.

It seems the comment function has not been working on my blog lately, so I thought I would post some emails I received from people who wanted to comment on my post about Chornobyl aid organizations.

“thank you so much for writing this post: an eye-opening look into something that many people take for granted…”

and - thank you for your blog.

warmest wishes,
veronica

Ann, thanks for your very insightful comments on this subject. Our organization (Chernobyl Children’s Project International) recently started investing significantly in “in-country” rehabilitation for these kids. While an opportunity to summer abroad is very attractive for many families, there are many other Belarusian families who would not even consider sending their kids to a stranger’s home. (If the situation were reversed, I would feel the same!) Also, we work with many ill or handicapped children from home a vacation abroad would not be realistic — for example, children recovering from cancer or heart operations.

Your point is quite valid however . . . it is really hard for people to get excited about programs in which they are directly involved, thus the appeal of these summer programs. Real change requires the long view. Charities have to do their best to ride both horses in order to both keep their funding stream alive, and to affect real change in the regions. For our part, we are moving more and more toward in-country programs. People have to help themselves, and be supported in that, and not always be left beholden to the charity of others.

All the best to you,

Kathy Ryan
Executive Director/USA
Chernobyl Children’s Project International
Visit: http://chernobyl.typepad.com

Since my BBC debut last week, I have received several emails that have sparked some very interesting email conversations. One discussion has been about the so-called “children of Chornobyl” and the multitude of charities in western Europe and the U.S. who provide aid to children living in Chornobly-affected territories. One of the very popular programs some charities offer is a “rehabilitative” trip abroad - kids spend a few weeks or a few months, usually in the summer, living in, for example, the United States with a host family. I’ve heard of children spending summers in Italy, Portugal, France, and Ireland, as well as the U.S.

I have very mixed feelings about these programs. First of all, for how long are people going to continue being labeled “Chornobyl affected”? Twenty-one years after the accident, most of the Ukrainian territory designated as Chornobyl-affected is fine for human habitation, with radiation levels lower than natural background radiation is some parts of the world (northern Finland, for example), or even completely dissipated. What makes a child “Chornobyl affected” today? His zip code? Because his parents listed his permanent address as being in the 4th zone, even though he was born hundreds of kilometers away and grew up in a different region of Ukraine?

I certainly think the chance to spend a summer in another country is a fantastic opportunity for any kid, no matter where they are from. And the more Ukrainians, especially young Ukrainians, who can travel abroad and see examples of life in other countries, the better. At the least, they will see what other people expect and receive from their governments - good roads, clean water, gas lines. Maybe they will learn about how people in those countries actually pay their taxes, and actually receive government services back from them. They can learn that it is not normal to expect to give or receive bribes for every little transaction. They can see that in some countries laws are serious things, followed by your average citizen and enforced by your average police officer. They will also see that most people in those countries work pretty hard, too, and money doesn’t grow on trees there and your average person does not own a Bentley. In other words, exchange opportunities generally break myths about foreign countries, as well as about your own country.

On the other hand, the hundreds of thousands of dollars these organizations spend to bring a few children every year to the US, Italy, France, etc., could make a HUGE difference in the lives of thousands of people living in Chornobyl-affected villages: build or renovate the gas lines so there is gas heat in every home, school, hospital, and other building in the village so they don’t have to burn wood for fuel (which causes a whole set of respiratory and other problems from the smoke); clean wells and build sanitary systems so every household has access to clean water, and with the gas heat, hot water for more sanitary washing; renovate roads, repair decrepit schools, install quality windows for better insulation. Invest in small business development to create jobs. The list could go on and on.

Richard D North, author of the website Chernobyllegacy.com, writing about the so-called “rehabilitative summers abroad”, points out a fatal flaw in most of the humanitarian efforts surrounding the Chornobyl accident, “one of the bad things about it is that the kids have to buy into the ‘horror story’ to get on the ride - or rather, they learn that victim hood is profitable.”

This is certainly the great dilemma for programs like UNDP’s Chornobyl Recovery and Development Programme. They work hard to to destroy the myths, to help people move beyond the victim syndrome and take control of their lives again. The slow, plodding work of economic development, social mobilization, and community development does not produce dramatic results quickly; instead, it takes years of steady support and maybe you’ll see a measurable change in society.

But international donor agencies and charities want to give money and support in response to a tragedy. And if you don’t play up the “tragic lasting effects” of Chornobyl (which may or may not even be real), you don’t get aid. It’s a real conundrum.

I do believe aid organizations want to help people have better lives. But when I hear them talking about “we’re going to support this community because it’s not too far from Kyiv and we can easily visit it in a day during our short visit to Ukraine”, it’s hard for me to take them seriously. If they really want to help the most needy, the most affected, the most at-risk people, then they should go to the far away, isolated, hard-to-get-to places - precisely because no one goes there. And if they want to make a difference in a child’s life, help make her home town better. A “rehabilitative” summer in the Ireland is fantastic and I’m sure lots of fun, but when you send that child back to her village with poor heat, unclean water, and little access to the outside world due to terrible roads (not to mention no computers or internet), have you really made that child healthier? Have you really improved her life?

I wish aid organizations would stop doing what is easy for them to do, and what makes them feel good, and would start doing the hard work that helps disadvantaged people have better lives.

A couple months ago I was contacted by the BBC Radio program “Woman’s Hour”. They were preparing a broadcast about women bloggers, they liked my blog, and they asked me to record one of my essays for the segment. They selected a few excerpts from this essay about one of my trips in the Chornobyl-affected area of Ukraine.

I went to the BBC Radio office in Kyiv, had a recording session (which was kind of cool), and pretty much forgot about it.

Well, thankfully Woman’s Hour didn’t forget! The feature will broadcast on 9 October 2007 at 10 am GMT. You can listen to the broadcast via the Woman’s Hour website.

Update: the program segment is archived at the link above, so if you missed the live broadcast, you can still listen to my segment over and over and over.

After my second visit to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, I didn’t think I would go again. But when I received an email announcing the first Radiation Reconnaissance Mission, organized by Pripyat.com and guided by Sergey Mirnyi, I couldn’t pass up this unique opportunity.

We started the day early, our group of about 20 leaving Kyiv at 8:00 am. During the ride north to the Exclusion Zone, we received folders with maps of the Zone and a notepad, as well as Terra-P dosimeters produced by the Ukrainian company ECOTEST.

These simple dosimeters (labeled “for everyday use” on the packaging) measure gamma radiation, and include a Geiger counter to measure beta radiation. Gamma, however, is the more serious and dangerous of those two types, though, and it was what most concerned us during our mission.

The device measures in millisieverts (mSv), with .30 mSv being the standard acceptable norm in Ukraine. Interestingly, one guide informed us that the standard acceptable norm in the US is about twice as high as in Ukraine, and even higher in some European countries. The Soviet Union, and later Ukraine, took a very conservative approach when setting acceptable norms for radiation levels. Many places we visited during this trip were well below even the conservative Ukrainian standards.

Our first stop of the day was a couple kilometers outside the Exclusion Zone, at the site of a base camp set up in May 1986.

One of our guides, Oleh Veklenko, described the day they arrived and set up this camp, on May 3, 1986. The brigade of about 3000 men first went to a location about 18 kilometers from the nuclear power station, only to discover that the radiation levels were extremely high there. They were moved to this site farther away, arriving about 3:00 pm at the large grassy field. Within an hour, the onslaught of 3000 soldiers stirred up so much dust that the air was filled with the sandy clouds. At dinner that evening, Oleh recalled eating his porridge in which he could feel the sand. He wondered what danger they were consuming.

There was a tent camp on the site for the first year, after which brick buildings were constructed. The camp was in use for at least three more years, until it was abandoned sometime in 1990.

Sergey first returned to the camp site in 2001, and at that time its remains were clearly visible from the road. In the last 6 years, though, the trees have grown significantly, and the site is no longer visible from the road.

Once inside the Exclusion Zone, our first stop was at the sign designating the border for the Chornobyl raiyon (like a county in the U.S.). Radiation measured at .12 mSv.

Our next stop was at a former vehicle decontamination point.

Sergey described the route a team would follow after a reconnaissance mission, going through the first checkpoint and washing. If the vehicle was still “dirty”, it was washed again. If still dirty, it was sent to the vehicle graveyard. In practice, though, Sergey said they often found ways around the decontamination check. He describes one such occasion in his collection of short stories, Worse than Radiation. My dosimeter measured a gamma level of .24 mSv.

We stopped next at the village Zalesye, located southwest of the town of Chornobyl.

I had readings from .16 mSv to .27 mSv, both below Ukrainian norms. I always feel a bit uncomfortable walking through abandoned villages, looking in the windows and yards of someone’s home. It doesn’t feel right to me to be a voyeur into someone’s home. And when I checked the radiation level and found this village was well within the conservative Ukrainian standards, I was so sad. Sad for all that people lost, all that trauma they suffered. I looked at Sergey, showing him the .16 mSv reading, and he said “I know. For what did they do all this?”

From Zalesya, we bypassed the town of Chornobyl and stopped just north of it at the one remaining working decontamination point in the Exclusion Zone. It seemed more like a scrap metal collection point.

Collecting scrap metal has become a profitable industry within the Exclusion Zone.

At the next stop, near the buried village of Kopachi, we all received a special protective suit, including booties to cover our shoes, gloves, and face masks.

It seemed a bit extreme, and Sergey himself said he thought it was ridiculous. But the rules are the rules, and since we were going off the paved roads, Chernobylinterinform, the agency managing visits to the Zone, required us all to put on this get-up.

Unfortunately, pictures speak louder than words, and I knew the pictures of our group in these crazy outfits would leave a stronger impression on those who read my blog than anything I could write attempting to dispel myths about the Zone. The pictures are pretty cool, though, I have to admit, and it was fun to feel like we were doing something exotic and even risky, even though we weren’t.

Several villages were completely razed and buried underground in the months following the accident, such as Kopachi. Here, our group stands on a mound under which is buried a Kopachi house.

My dosimeter read .24 mSv at the top of the mound. A few yards away, I measured .50 mSv.

We proceeded on and stopped next at the edge of the so-called “Red Forest.” The name was given in the weeks after the accident when the pine needles turned red as the trees died from extreme radiation exposure.

The forest that now stands on that area is all new growth since 1986. Although there are no more “red” trees, the name Red Forest has stuck.

Sergey told us that during their radiation reconnaissance missions in 1986, if they saw the signature red trees they didn’t even bother to take readings in that area - they knew it was over 1 roentgen/hour (.11 Sieverts/hour). The readings today measure 2000 times lower than in 1986.

We made a few more stops at various points along the edge of the Red Forest, and at the so-called “Torch”, the sign at the entrance to the territory of the Chornobyl Atomic Energy Station.

We stopped outside the 4th reactor, at the infamous visitors parking lot.

We were supposed to go over by the administrative building, near the cooling pond and the Chornobyl monument, but as we drove up we saw the delegation of the Minister of Emergencies, who was at the site preparing for the upcoming visit of the President and Prime Minister, who signed a contract for construction of a new shelter object over the destroyed reactor on Monday. So we headed instead over to Pripyat, stopping first at another buried village, Chistohalovka.

This is all that remains of the village, the World War II monument that stood in the center of the village.

There was a new sign just inside the gate at Pripyat (at least I hadn’t seen it on my previous visits).

Rough translation:

Attention Pripyat visitors!
For your complete safety we ask that you follow these guidelines in the town:
1. You are in a zone of increased ionizing radiation. Try to refrain from using alcohol or food products on the streets of the town.
2. A large number of buildings in the town are in emergency condition, there have already been incidents of structural failure. Therefore we highly recommend that you do not enter into buildings, even if you do not see any external damage or warning signs.

Do not forget that you are on the territory where one of the worst ecological catastrophes in human history occurred. Out of respect for the deeds of those who gave their health and lives in the fight with the consequences of the accident, as well as those who lived in this town, we earnestly request that you do not destoy Pripyat for souvenirs and do not litter on the streets - there are no municipal services in the town that could clean up.

Respectfully,
The administration of the internet project PRIPYAT.com
WWW.PRIYPAT.COM - site of the town Pripyat

We went to some places in Pripyat that I hadn’t seen before. One was the police station.

Bill in the holding cell.

Visiting the jail gave me a whole new appreciation for this amazing evacuation that took place in under 4 hours in Pripyat. Granted, it happened about 36 hours later than it should have, but still, to evacuate 45,000+ people in a matter of hours is amazing. Include in that number the prisoners and hospital patients - it’s incredible to think about moving those people in a safe and proper fashion.

In one jail cell was a huge pile on the floor of the prison records - hundreds of index cards with the information about people who were arrested.

I regret that I didn’t take a picture of the whole pile. We picked some up at random, reading aloud the crimes and fines. Most of them were for alcohol offenses - making samogon (home-brew liquor), driving while intoxicated, or my favorite “crossing the street with difficulty.” In 1986, Gorbachev’s prohibition policies were in full force.

Behind the police station was some kind of vehicle graveyard, which includes an old reconnaissance vehicle like the one Sergey said he used in 1986.

There were 7 such vehicles in his group, but the identification numbers are missing from this one, and so he can’t tell if it’s the one he himself used.

Next we walked past a really interesting and unique tree - half regular pine, half blue spruce.

It’s bizarre, and of course one’s first reaction is that it must be some kind of mutation. But no, it’s nothing as exotic as that. In fact, it was (and still is) a common practice to graft a more expensive blue spruce onto a less expensive regular pine, which was a more economical way to decorate a town with lovely blue spruces. This tree was just such a graft, only no one has tended or pruned it it over 21 years, and thus both parts of the tree have grown healthily and abundantly.

One of our last stops was at a seemingly innocuous little building with a small parking lot. We took measurements at two different places approaching a strange-looking hunk of metal, both of which were relatively low. On the actual piece of machinery, though, everyone’s dosimeters went berserk.

Openings on the side of the machine were just large enough to put a hand through, and we recorded the highest radiation measurements of the day inside the object.

One person had a measurement of over 80 mSv. I didn’t leave my hand in long enough for the dosimeter to reach that extremely dangerous level. Sergey’s guess is that this was some kind of earth-digging machine, which would explain the high contamination on the inside of the machine, if it was used to excavate highly contaminated soil. It was a good lesson about the dangers of radiation, and the impossibility of judging safety and danger. You really need special equipment, and you really have to check every few centimeters.

We ended our day at the Chernobylinterinform offices in the town of Chornobyl, where we had a de-briefing and reviewed our mapped radiation measurements. Sergey showed us the hand-drawn map he made in 1986 for his reconnaissance missions.

The official maps of the territory were classified and thus the reconnaissance teams were not allowed to take them with them on their missions. Sergey also told how they had no paper; soldiers themselves bought school notepads and divided up the blank pages so as to be able to record their measurements.

Sergey talked for a bit more about their experiences on reconnaissance missions in 1986. The highest measurement recorded in that year was 10 roentgen/hour (or about 1.2 Sv/hour). Our highest recording on this day was 85 millisieverts/hour, thousands of times lower than 21 years ago. “Hundreds of thousands of liquidators did not work for nothing,” Sergey commented. There efforts truly had remarkable results.

The day was long and exhausting (we returned to Kyiv about 9:00 pm), but very interesting and extremely educational. Pripyat.com is a fantastic organization doing really great things in and for the Exclusion Zone. Their newest project is a proposal to make the town of Pripyat into a kind of reserve - if not a nature reserve, maybe an urban reserve?

More photos from the day trip are here.

Our volunteerism promotion camp has finally reached Korosten, our last site of the program. The group is doing their presentation with a group of school kids right now, and I snuck out to check my email for the first time this week.

We are all exhausted, full of impressions, happy, grouchy, overwhelmed, goofy and very very dirty. In fact, I think we are all so dirty we’re not even dirty any more - at least we don’t seem dirty to each other any more.

We could not have had a more remarkable stream of bad luck with water. Absolutely everywhere we have been there has been a problem with water. We knew that one or two villages wouldn’t have running water, so we planned the itinerary to intermix those with villages that have running water and indoor plumbing. But in every single village, there has been one problem or another and we had no running water. In one, the sewage system was broken and thus we could not use the indoor toilet or brand new shower in the Youth Center. In another, the water pump broke two days ago and the entire village is without water. In a third, even though they had told us they had running water in the youth center, it turned out to not be true. 2 villages ago we bought a big basin and a bucket. After heating well water with our electric tea kettle, I tried to teach everyone how to bucket-bathe. They didn’t catch on, to say the least. Judging by the amount of water splashed all over the washroom, I can only guess exactly what they each did in there.

In Korosten, the local Youth Parliament arranged for us to stay in the building of the local Red Cross chapter. Apparently the building used to have hot water and working showers, but no one thought to double check. When we arrived, of course the first question from everyone was “Where is the shower?” The workers informed us that they have no showers anymore, and just one toilet. They suggested we go across the street to the local banya (public bathhouse). I hurriedly went to the only hotel in town to check into a room so everyone could use the shower there. Guess what? There was some kind of accident there and they have NO WATER. I nearly burst into tears, and I didn’t have the courage to tell our group yet.

I decided to check out the banya and reserve it for us for later this evening. Guess what? It doesn’t work today! Our luck is really absolutely unbelievable.

Our local partners, the Korosten Youth Parliament, had arranged for us to do our presentation today in the town park, after which we would all participate in a trash-collecting action to help prepare for tomorrow’s “Town Day” festivities. I’d been watching the clouds gathering all morning, and just as we walked out of the Red Cross to head to the park, the downpour started. The Youth Parliamentarians hurriedly made arrangements for us to use a room in the Culture House, while we called for taxis to drive us there. I feel like someone is having a great laugh at our expense - no water where we want and need it, and tons of water where we don’t want it.

It’s been a great week with this group, and I have come to love each and every one of them, but I also am ready to finish our program, go home to my own bed and shower, and sleep for a week. I felt myself on the edge when I found out the hotel has no water, honestly not able to take anymore - it feels like it’s just been one thing after another this entire week, and I am exhausted. Fortunately, I have many friends here in Korosten, via Igor, and I called Vlad. I already don’t remember what I said to him - he later told me he didn’t understand what was wrong, but he could tell from my voice that I really needed help. He managed to figure out where to meet me, and drove over immediately. While the group went off to make their presentation with the school kids, Vlad took me to another banya on the edge of town and helped me reserve it for 8-10 pm tonight. I took a quick look around, asking all kinds of questions that seemed to surprise the manager, like “Do you have showers?” and “Do you have hot water?” She answered everything with “Of course!”. I was SO relieved!

Vlad and a couple other friends will join us tonight, and not only will we have an evening of hot running water and showers, we will also have a cool cultural experience - I doubt any of our group has been to a Russian banya before.

My mood has picked up, even as the rain is coming down harder. We won’t been cleaning the park today, but we’ll be cleaning ourselves, and I think that will be much more fulfilling for our volunteers than anything else could be today.

I didn’t think I would have any desire to visit the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone a third time, but then I got this announcement. How awesome! I’m signed up and can’t wait to go!

Dad and I had the opportunity to take a one-day excursion to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone on June 19. We saw many of the same places I had visited during my first visit last year, but we stopped at a couple spots I hadn’t been to before. Overall, the visit wasn’t nearly as exciting or impressive as my first trip, and I have to wonder why some people go back again and again. I mean, it was still interesting, and I suppose if you visit different places and meet different people it would be even more interesting, but to revisit most of the same spots wasn’t so overwhelming.

One new stop for me was the famous amusement park, scheduled to be opened for the May Day celebrations just a few days after the accident.

I made this fun little video there. We were standing on asphalt, and a few meters away was a patch of moss. Moss LOVES radiation and absorbs it like crazy and this little patch created a heck of a hot spot.

A few meters away it was back to low readings.

We also stopped at a kindergarten. That was a sad spot, I thought.

Everyone starting clicking away with their cameras when we came across this on the floor.

I thought it was put there specifically for tourists, but our guide reminded us that in 1986 the Cold War was in full force and all schools regularly had various security drills, including drills for chemical attacks. One such drill took place just a few days before the accident. Unfortunately, none of those drills were put into practice for the first 36 hours after the accident.

The tour always includes a stop at the information center, in the shadow of the fourth reactor.

I didn’t listen to the official presentation much this time, since I heard it all last year. Instead, I spent more time looking at the pictures and displays around the room. Something that really caught my eye were some photos from inside the destroyed reactor building. I don’t remember if they were there or not last year, but this year I quickly noticed them as I’ve done so much reading about Chornobyl since my first visit. In particular, I was really excited to see a photo of the so-called “Elephant’s Foot”, a big hunk of gunk. I’d read about it in several different books but couldn’t quite grasp what it actually looked like. It, and several other hunks of gunk, are made up of melted fuel with whatever other material got caught up with it when it cooled and re-solidified. Since I’ll never see the actual “Elephant’s Foot” with my own eyes, I was pretty excited to see this photo of it.

Here are my photos, and here are Dad’s photos.

I’m off this weekend to Dubrovitsa, in Rivenenska oblast, about 400 km northwest of Kyiv. This is about the same distance as to Odessa, only the the roads are lot crappier to get there and the town at the end of the trip is not nearly as fun and interesting as Odessa. Oh well. I’ll be attending a community organization meeting in Udritsk, and youth center openings in Zalyuzha and Nenkovichi. If I survive a weekend of the accompanying “furshets” (parties/banquets), it will be quite an achievement.

I had the delightful opportunity to spend the evening of the 21st anniversary of the Chornobyl accident with Sergii Miryni, a writer, scientist, and commander of radiation reconnaissance platoon in Chornobyl in 1986.

I first met Sergii at the opening of a photo exhibition at the Chornobyl museum in March. Last week I attended a reading of his screenplay about Chornobyl. Michael and Dave both took some great photos of the event.

Sergii’s dissertation is titled “Chernobyl Liquidators’ Health as a Psycho-Social Trauma”, and excerpts of it (in fact, most of it) are available on his website. I was fascinated to listen as he retold the process that brought him to writing about Chornobyl, about the struggle to deal with everything he had seen, the work he had done. We discussed numerous books about Chornobyl, and he highly recommended “Chernobyl: A Documentary Story” by Yuri Shcherbak, which unfortunately seems to be out of print. It was this author who expressed what Sergii had noticed himself, too - that there just is not a way, there is not the right language, to adequately describe or discuss Chornobyl. Yet Sergii found writing about Chornobyl to be the only way he could comes to terms with it. His prose (also available in the original Russian and some of it in English translation on his website) is fascinating to read. His latest unpublished book, “Живая сила” (”Live forces”), is, as he describes it, a comedic novel, which he recognizes will be controversial. He explained, though, that it is important to start talking about Chornobyl in a new way. Just as World War I created a whole new genre in literature, so, he feels, will Chornobyl.

Sergii said the most relevant book about Chornobyl contains neither the word “Chornobyl” nor the word “radiation”. The book is Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman. I can’t wait to read it.

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.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about Chornobyl. Also I’ve been talking about it a lot with some friends who are living and working temporarily in Kyiv, all of whom are very interested to know more about Chornobyl. One friend, Michael, is “working on a documentary photo project on people affected by radiation in the former Soviet Union.” He and I have talked a lot about Chornobyl, swapped resources and contacts, and he will travel with me next week on some site visits to interview and photograph resettled people from the Exclusion Zone.

Something I have noticed is that in all the books and reports I have read, there is never a consistent story of what actually happened, or even of how many people died. One book will say one person died in the initial explosion, another will say three. If a fact as simple as how many people died in the first few minutes can’t be confirmed, how can you believe anything else that is reported about the accident, much less the lasting consequences?

As luck would have it, Andriy Arkhipov stopped by our office today. Andriy is the scientist who guided us through the Exclusion Zone last year. I trust him, and I thought he might be able to provide me with some straight answers, or at least some better insight.

“Why,” I asked him, “do the reports differ all the time about the facts of the accident? How many people actually died in the explosion?”

“The only people who know exactly what happened that night are the people who were there,” he said to me. “No one else knows for sure. What I can tell you is that definitely one man died in the explosion, and he was trapped under rubble and his body was never recovered.” (This fact is consistently reported in everything I’ve read, so I already knew that this was at least true.)

“We also know,” he continued, “that 28 firemen died in the immediate aftermath as a result of extreme radiation exposure (in the first week, two weeks, month).” This was a figure I hadn’t heard before, although I’ve read numerous accounts of the first responders’ heroic efforts and horrific deaths.

All this “activity” lately in my own life about Chornobyl has gotten me thinking about my own safety and how I might be able to take more control of the situation, have more first-hand knowledge about the levels of radiation I may be exposed to. I decided to find out about dosimeters. I found some websites selling dosimeters and other radiation-detection equipment, but quickly realized I have no idea what exactly I’d need. I again took advantage of the chance meeting with Andriy today to ask his advice. I told him I want to be able to measure radiation in foodstuffs at the market. “Impossible,” he said. You need very specific, very advanced, and very big equipment to be able to do that. In other words, not portable, and way out of my price range. He did offer, though, that I could buy a radiation detector device for use at home; it’s about the size of a desktop laser printer, with a hole in the front where you insert the food item in question. Andriy made a quick call, and before I knew it, we had a fax with a price list of radiometers and dosimeters, the least expensive being 897 hrivna (a little under $200) - yikes! And here I’d been thinking I could get something small to carry around with me, thinking to spend something like 50 bucks. Think again!

“So how can people protect themselves? How can we know what’s safe and what’s not?”

“Everything sold in the markets is supposed to be checked by the official radiation detection control point. In theory. In practice, well, not everyone does it.”

So, again, I ask, how are we supposed to protect ourselves? No wonder the general population long ago stopped actively worrying about radiation in their food - whether it’s there or not, you basically have no way of finding out.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday visiting seven youth centers that have been funded by CRDP in the Ivankivsky and Polissky raiyons. Sasha, one of our drivers, helped me with my Ukrainian homework on the drive up to Ivankiv, and we had some funny moments. Sasha has lived in Ukraine all his life, but was raised in a Russian-speaking household. Although he totally understands Ukrainian, and he can speak it pretty fluently, he nonetheless says that Russian is just easier for him. A couple of times, neither of us was quite sure how to conjugate a verb, as we both the words mixed up with the Russian conjugation. After about an hour, I told him my mouth was tired from moving in such unusual ways, trying to make so many new sounds. He thought that was pretty funny.

We started from the town of Ivankiv, about 90 minutes north and a bit west of Kyiv, where we picked two of our regional coordinators, Vladimir (aka Volodya) and Valentina (aka Valya). I adore Valya, she’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And she’s amazingly talented - she writes poetry, paints, draws - and her real specialty is floristics. She grows a huge variety of flowers and other plants on her yard, she dries the petals and leaves, and she makes incredibly beautiful pictures out by gluing the delicate petals onto paper. Here are two examples of her work.

The big topic for everyone was, of course, the political situation right now. Sasha, Volodya and Valya spent hours throughout our 2 days together hashing and re-hashing everything that’s happened this week and everything that could happen in the near and far future.

As we drove through the rural villages, fields, and forests, we saw the burning grasses that is the spring and autumn tradition here - villages burn the fields to make them better for farming, and burn the brush along the sides of the roads and underbrush in the forests to clean it up. I’ve been told by western farmers that burning twice a year is excessive, but it’s a centuries-old practice here and no one, I’m sure, will convince the farmers to do it differently, even though it’s an especially stupid thing to do in the Chornobyl-contaminated areas. I dislike it mostly because it smells bad, and the air is full of acrid black smoke everywhere. There was one point, though, when we were driving through an area with no burning going on, and there was a gentle spring rain for a couple minutes. The air smelled so sweet, so clean. I realized I haven’t smelled that in quite a long time - the air in Kyiv is so polluted from cars and industry, and the countryside air is so often spoiled by the disgusting smoke of burning fields, burning leaves, or burning trash. What a rare and precious moment it was to smell the clean spring rain!

Spring cleaning is also in full swing, as communities prepare for Easter. Painting fences, curbs, and the base of trees is a spring tradition, as is cleaning up flower beds, parks and public areas. Orthodox Easter is early this year, and happens to fall on the same Sunday as Latin Easter. It’s a national holiday, as well, so we’ll have Monday off of work.

As you drive through rural Ukraine, you also can’t help but notice the abandoned buildings - empty, collapsing houses; collective farms and factories that have closed. We saw firemen working on a burning house in a tiny village. Valya said there are fires all the time now, so many houses are empty and no one is taking care of them. I suspect that burning the fields with so much wooden houses in the same area is also not a very smart thing to do, but again, that doesn’t seem to stop them.

We saw storks everywhere. Their huge nests sit on top of electricity posts, water towers, lamp posts, and other tall structures. Storks are considered good luck, and disturbing one of their nests is an unthinkable act. It doesn’t matter how much their nest might interfere with or even damage a structure, if a pair of storks decide to nest somewhere, it’s their spot now.

In the village of Obukhovichib, I noticed a sign for a Fabric Museum hanging in the second floor window of the building being renovated for a Youth Center. I can never pass up an opportunity to see a museum, and I have especially come to love the little museums in rural villages. Sometimes they are bizarre, sometimes a bit sad, always a bit quirky, and never dull. I asked if I could see their’s, and they were only too happy to oblige. This museum is dedicated to the traditional craft of weaving beautiful Ukrainian fabrics - rugs, tablecloths, special “towels” used during traditional ceremonies and on holidays, and clothes. The colors are brilliant, the intricate and complicated patterns breathtaking. Gosh, I love finding these gems of places in villages!

I also had the opportunity to visit the Arts and Crafts Center in Ivankiv. Children learn to sew, weave, make papier-mache, embroidery, ceramics, and, of course, the famous Ukrainian pysanki (intricately painted Easter eggs). Sasha couldn’t quite grasp the concept of weaving, and the center director tried hard to explain to him the process. He was speechless as he tried to comprehend how much time it takes to weave one 5-foot long table runner.

Valya also took me for a short walk through the Ivankiv park, with the usual WWII memorial, as well as a Chornobyl monument in memory of a young Ivankiv firefighter, who was at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant the day of the accident, and who died at just 23 years old. Valya told me some more of her own memories about that time, as she is a life-long resident of this town located less than 60 kilometers (<40 miles) from the nuclear station. She had given birth to her first child just one month before the accident, and was out for a walk with him on April 26. She had a bad headache, and she noticed that her son was unusually fussy that day, and she thought maybe they had gotten too much sun during their walk. No one had said anything at all about what had happened at Chornobyl. Only after three days did they hear any official news, and she and her newborn son went to stay with her parents-in-law in a Moldovan village for the next 3 months. But she had a really hard time living with them, and she came back to Ivankiv with her baby. She got pregnant again the next year, and gave birth to another son. She was always worrying about what kinds of medical problems they could have. Her first son’s ribcage did not grow normally, and she says it’s like there’s a hole in his chest where his breastbone should be. Her second son has never had any unusual health problems, she says, but her first son was always sickly. She says the only explanation she can think of is that it was because of Chornobyl and the fact that she took him outside those first days after the accident, not knowing any better.

As we walked through the small park and along the river, she pointed out the spot where the trucks coming from Chornobyl had been washed down, where the contaminated water flowed into the river. “How could they do that?” she wondered aloud. “Valya, what other choice did they have?” I lamely said. “That’s true, they had to do it somewhere, I suppose.”

Valya also showed me a relatively new monument in the park, dedicated to the memory of 360 of Ivankiv’s Jews who were massacred by the Nazi’s in September 1941. Sadly, someone has already vandalized it, breaking off part of the marker.

I attended the opening of a new photo exhibition at the Chornobyl Museum yesterday, “For Love” with photos by American photographer Kristina Brendel.

Kristina and her husband have been living part-time in Arizona and part-time in Minsk, Belarus, for over 10 years. Her photos in this exhibit were almost all shot within the Belarussian Exclusion Zone (except for a few photos of children from the Belarussian city Gomel, which the museum specifically asked her to include). The program was very nice, and included a wonderful performance by the Ukrainian folk chorus “Homin”.

An example:

I also recorded a 4-minute video of one of the chorus members reading a poem she wrote about Chornobyl, but it’s too big to post to YouTube. If I can figure that out, I’ll post it later.

3 other Americans and I went to dinner after the program with Kristina, her husband Doug and their translator Yuri. It was fascinating to hear about the way the Exclusion Zone is approached in Belarus - completely differently from in Ukraine! First and foremost, Kristina there is total denial by the Belarussian government that there is any problem associated with Chornobyl - they deny contamination and in fact, President Lukashenko has started a campaign to open up the Exclusion Zone and repopulate that territory. On the other hand, absolutely no scientific research is allowed to be conducted with the Belarussian Zone. One scientist she knows was arrested for attempting to do some research there, and remains in jail to this day.

This is quite in contrast to the approach on the Ukrainian side of the border - scientific researchers have labs within the Exclusion Zone, and as I wrote from my own trip to the Exclusion Zone; and there is absolutely no official discussion about re-populating the Zone. True, some people have moved back voluntarily, but that has been against official government policy.

Belarus is a very small country with no way to expand its borders, and I can understand that having something like one-third of its territory closed to habitation and agriculture production is problematic. But the idea of pretending that it is safe to live in those areas, and to have a plan to encourage people to move back into those areas is frightening. I hope the Belarussian people are not as naive or short-sighted as their President.

I am reading the book “Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl“, and I can’t put it down. I’ve read quite a few books, stacks of reports, and loads of websites about the Chornobyl accident and the subsequent consequences. This is the book I wish I had found 18 months ago when I first came to Ukraine to work with the Chornobyl Recovery and Development Programme.

As it was written in 1991, I was at first quite skeptical of the accuracy of the reporting and the author’s purported claim to have gained access to previously classified documents and secret reports, especially as a foreign writer who doesn’t speak Russian. Yet he seems to have gained confidences with key players in the Chornobyl saga, as well as access to at least some of the previously unpublished materials. I don’t think this book has all the truth in it, but it is an impressive attempt to bring more of the truth to light than had been up to that time.

The blow-by-blow account of the first minutes and hours after the accident are fascinating, presenting a real human side to the men and women who heretofore were only generic “plant workers” to me. Their heroism, their ignorance, their blind faith in the System (Soviet Union) and the system (the engineering of the nuclear power plant)… it is, plain and simple, tragic.

I was very surprised to realize that I have visited many of the towns mentioned in the book. Ivankiv, less than 60 km (<40 miles) from the Chornobyl station, is one of our partner communities, but I hadn’t realized what an important role it had played in the evacuation and clean-up activities – it served as a base of operations outside the Exclusion Zone, through which many refugees passed, and from which soldiers, other workers, and supplies were dispatched to the nuclear power station.

Our regional coordinator in Ivankiv, Valentina, was in the office this week, and I mentioned to her that I am reading this book and told her some of what it says about Ivankiv. “Oh, Ann, it was such a terrible time,” she said to me. “There was a base in Ivankiv. I remember it was beautiful spring weather, and I was outside walking with my young son for hours every day for the first three days after it happened. We didn’t know, no one said it was dangerous. Outside!” She held her hand to her chest as she recalled those memories, as if the horror of it still brings her a physical pain. “Then we learned what had happened, and I took my son to Moldova.”

Sometimes I forget what my colleagues lived through, that they themselves are first-hand witnesses to the Chornobyl catastrophe.

Igor, having been just 9 at the time of the accident, mostly remembers what a great summer he had that year because he got to go a bunch of camps all over the Soviet Union. He had some great experiences, and I think it instilled in him a love of travel, but it is a bizarre twist of circumstances that he remembers that time as so much fun.

In “Ablaze”, Read mentions some of the morbid jokes that started amongst the clean-up workers. In our office, we sometimes jokingly “toast” Chornobyl; without it, none of us would be here (at CRDP). Igor and I often joke that something weird and unexplained is because of “Chornobyl”. And I always refer to a dish with mushrooms as coming with a big dose of radiation. It’s perverse, but I guess that’s what we do when we are faced with something overwhelmingly horrifying. If we focused only on what we don’t know and what we can’t change, I think we would go insane. Joking about it eases the tension, I guess.

Last October, we hosted the 2nd annual Chornobyl Economic Development Forum conference in Korosten. We invited one of the UN’s Global Compact partners to participate in the conference, and the head of Ericsson Ukraine , Mr. Rasmus Norby, made a presentation about their Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. Mr. Norby had made it clear from the start, though, that he did not want to be solicited during the conference for donations or corporate sponsorship of any projects. No problem, we said.

Mr. Norby and 2 or 3 of his colleagues who also attended the conference stayed until late that evening, enjoying the dinner reception with the rest of the conference participants. He doesn’t speak Russian or Ukrainian, which made it impossible for him to engage in conversations with most of the other attendees (although his Ukrainian colleauges were able to translate for him). Knowing how isolating it can feel to be in a room with lots of people with whom you cannot communicate, I struck up a conversation with Mr. Norby. Trying to find a topic that I thought would interest him, I started to tell him about some of our computer and internet projects in rural villages. One of our biggest challenges and frustrations has been with Ukrtelecom, the state-owned phone company. Their 10-year expansion plan (a) will take an absurdly long time to expand and upgrade phone lines throughout Ukraine, and (b) puts extremely low priority on expansion and upgrade in Chornobyl-affected territories. Nonetheless, we’ve supported a few projects to provide internet connectivity in a couple schools and one or two youth centers. These dial-up connections are usually extremely slow, unstable, and the service is sometimes simply unavailable for weeks at a time (very reminiscent of my days in the Moldovan village Tvarditsa!). I’ve been questioning from the time I joined CRDP why we are investing in old, out-dated, and inefficient/ineffective technology, when the rest of the technological world is converting to cable, DSL and mobile internet connections. None of us in CRDP have any expertise in the area, though, and in a typical Ukrainian fashion, it has been easier to implement a method that everyone is already familiar with. I asked Mr. Norby his thoughts on the subject, and he explained to me some of the newer internet connectivity options, like the already common GSM and the new technology EDGE. One of Ukraine’s leading mobile providers is gearing up to expand their new EDGE coverage throughout the entire country during 2007.

Then Mr. Norby did something that really took me by surprise - he asked me to write up and email to him a brief overview of the village internet project I had mentioned, including the problems with the internet connection. He offered to look into the situation and see if his company and their partner companies could come up with a new solution for these villages. I was pretty surprised, and very pleased. We talked a few more minutes, than went our separate ways to mingle during the reception.

As the evening progressed, the reception turned into a full-fledged party and I didn’t mention to anyone the conversation I’d had with Mr. Norby. A few days later, back in the office, I’d nearly forgotten about the interaction entirely. Then my boss copied me on an email to our communications manager, Mykola (aka Kolya), asking me to work with him to draft a letter to Mr. Norby. I then remembered, and went immediately to Kolya and recounted the conversation. “Ann, you’re the source!” he exclaimed. It turns out Mr. Norby talked to both Kolya and our boss, Pasha, during the reception about the idea of alternative internet connections for our partner villages, and neither of them could figure out how or why he had gotten this idea.

So, Kolya and I started working with UNDP/Ukraine’s Public-Private Partnerships Officer (Elena), and over the course of the next week or so we drafted a letter to Mr. Norby. Then Pasha and Elena had a meeting with Mr. Norby. Then they did some research on service providers in various areas. Then we went to visit a village to see if it would be a good site for a pilot project. And then… Friday we went to the village Dniprovske (about 2 1/2 hours northeast of Kyiv) with 2 guys from Ericsson, and they set up a new internet connection via mobile (cellular) service in the village hospital! This is lightening speed for a development project, from idea to implementation in less than four months.

We chose the Dniprovske village hospital for this pilot project for a number of reasons. First, there is a really fantastic young doctor running this small hospital. He is very energetic, innovative and a go-getter. He set up a website for the hospital, and won some really impressive medical equipment from a grant competition in Russia. He already uses the internet to promote the hospital with potential donors, as well as for medical consultations with doctors in Kyiv and Russia. (He’s been using an incredibly slow dial-up connection so far.) The second positive factor for implementing the pilot project in this village is the that there is a lot of potential to expand the internet service to other facilities in the village - the school, youth center, and village council buildings are all next to and across the street from the hospital.

It’s very exciting to see this idea realized, and we are all hopeful that we can replicate the model in other villages soon.

When I was home in November, I was interviewed by the Ohio State Alumni Association magazine. The profile was published in the January/February 2007 issue.

I was and am flattered that they wanted to interview me. The profile is pretty accurate, except for two rather glaring errors - (1) neither I nor Chernobyl are located in Russia, and (2) I don’t live “in Chernobyl.”

We spent 3 days this week in Korosten for the end-of-year CRDP retreat, with all of our regional coordinators, representatives from partner organizations, and a representative from the the Ukrainian Ministry of Emergencies. We had our meetings at the Korosten Center for Social-Psychological Rehabilitation. In the lobby was a fantastic display of dioramas created by local school children, with scenes of the Chornobyl station, the abandoned town of Pripyat, and some beautiful depictions of village life. The intricacy and handiwork is incredible.

Monday night, after a long day of meetings, we all headed out dinner. One guy had a chance to check the news on the internet before dinner, and read a report that a wall on the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant had collapsed, releasing a bunch of radioactive dust into the air. The report advised to keep children indoors. No official government statement had been made. My first thought was “Shit, what an idiot I am to be living in this place, so close to this disaster waiting to happen.” We all had a stressful thirty minutes or so, wondering what was really going on. I couldn’t have been with a better group of people, though - top experts and ministry officials whose work is focused on mitigating the effects of the Chornobyl catastrophe. Within a short time our colleagues were in contact with numerous officials, both at the station and in the town of Slavutych, where all the station workers live, and we were assured that it was all a rumor, nothing had happened. We all relaxed, sighed with relief, and then the jokes started - it must be a coping mechanism, joking about horribly frightening things. I couldn’t quite lose the feeling though that I’m playing with fire here. I like Ukraine, I’d like to stay here for a long time to come, but I’d like to live farther away from Chornobyl!

I will have my first trip to Western Ukraine over the next five days. Igor and I are going to Lviv to a 2-day conference on volunteerism, coordinated by Caritas of Ukraine (that website is only in Ukrainian, and looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2004, so if you are interested, here is the site of Caritas International, the parent organization). Igor and I will make a presentation about the role of volunteerism in the recovery and development of Chornobyl-affected communities. I’m hoping we’ll have a chance to see some of the city of Lvov, as I’ve heard it’s a beautiful place with a very different style and “feel” from other Ukrainian cities.

After the conference, we head a couple hours south to the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, where Igor attended university. He loves the city, and everyone I have ever heard talk about it has only great things to say about it. I’ve been wanting to visit it for over a year now, and am finally getting the chance! We’ll stay just one night in I-F, then head a couple hours up into the Carpathian mountains, to a lodge/resort for a long weekend. I’ve seen photos of the area, and they are breathtaking - I can’t wait! The weather forecast is calling for -20C (-4F), which I’m not very excited about, but as long as it’s not storming, we are hoping to go on some excurions in the mountains.

Orthodox Christmas is January 7, so not too many people here celebrate December 25 as a holiday. The UN offices will be closed on Monday, but Igor’s center in Korosten isn’t closed. He’s taking the day off on Monday, but has to be back to work on Tuesday, 26 December. So, we’ll spend Christmas Eve and part of Christmas Day in the mountains, then take the overnight train back to Kyiv on the 25th. I’m looking forward to seeing new places, to some quiet days in a beautiful place, far from the big city.

I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!