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Home
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> teg
> Issue 24
> TEG Issue 24: A Week in Belarus by David Slingsby and Susan Barker
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Electronic TEGPublished in TEG news issue 24, 1998, by the British Ecological Society. A Week in Belarusby David Slingsby and Susan Barker
We stayed several days in Gomel where we were provided with University accommodation in Sovetskaya, an immensely long street along which packed trolley buses trundled from early morning to late at night. Gennady's colleague Nicholai proved to be an excellent interpreter as well as good freind to us. We visited a secondary school called the Gomel Lycee where we were welcomed by the Headmaster. The Gomel Lycee is not a typical Belarussian school but a centre of excellence, well equipped with computers, links with the University, and with, amongst many other advantages, a remarkable facility for teaching biology. Some Belarussian schools have a 'living corner' where some kinds of animals are kept as pets. At the Gomel Lycee, the living corner contains tropical aquaria and an interesting collection of aquatic species to illustrate biodiversity in an innovative complex designed and realised by the Biology teacher herself. The Head was very keen to develop links with schools in Western countries and to establish a pupil exchange arrangement. If anyone reading this article would like to know more about this idea, we can make the necessary contacts. In a week so full of rich experiences, it is difficult to single out the one which left the greatest impression but if we had to chose it would be the visit to the nuclear contaminated areas of the district of Vetka. The day began with a visit to the headquarters of the nuclear decontamination agency. As with our visits to the Univesity and to the Lycee, the proceedings began with a lengthy formal introduction in Russian. We were then given the opportunity to ask questions about nuclear contamination issues and we ourselves were asked about the British nuclear industry. How did we know the radioactivity in Wales came from Chernobyl rather than Sellafield? Good question. Then, equipped with suitable permits (with our names written in Cyrillic script), we set off for Vetka by car. Within the contaminated area are two levels of control. In the worst affected area the entire population has been evacuated. We visited a large deserted village in one such area where numerous Russian-style wooden houses lay abandoned. You can't see radiation and the trees, the grass and the birds looked perfectly normal in the thin winter sunshine. It was the absence of people which produced a strange feeling. According to the Russian Orthodox Church, this was predicted in Revelation chapter 9. Many of the Geiger counter readings were low but every so often we came upon a hotspot where extra noughts were added to the read-out alarmingly quickly, revealing the invisible menace. Decontamination consisted mainly of removing roofs from houses for the fallout fell mainly on roofs. The roof materials were then buried in shallow landfill sites.
Further along the road we found a house still occupied. The occupant invited us into her immaculately tidy home and proudly showed off the handicrafts she had made herself, and offered vodka. In the midst of this apparently depressing situation she was cheerfully looking forward to celebrating the Feast of the Resurrection at the Russian Orthodox Easter. Outside there was a pole and on top there was a huge stork's nest. Any day the stork, symbol of hope and good luck would return. It was all rather like being in a film, yet it was all real. In the next settlement we encountered the second level of control where people still live despite the radiation. We visited the school, where the the pupils could not play outside because the school grounds were too radioactive. Decontamination was taking place, 12 years after the Chernobyl accident: 15 cm of topsoil was being scraped away to be replaced by less contaminated soil. Inside the school was a happy place, well equipped and well disciplined. Lessons seemed more formal than might be the case in the UK. Six year olds watched attentively whilst their teacher explained maths using a blackboard and chalk. Children in badly contaminated areas such as this spend time twice a year outside the contaminated zone in northern Belarus or Russia or further afield. In this school, some children had been to stay with families in Italy. Since our return we have made contact with people who organise holidays for Belarussian children as part of the Chernobyl Children's project based in Glossop, Derbyshire, with associated groups in, for example, Leeds, Littleborough and Rochdale, and also the Chernobyl Children's Cancer Care based in Durham. The reason for removing the children from the contaminated zone is to relieve the effects of continual exposure to radiation from the surroundings, provide access uncontaminated food and to enable the immune system to recover so that their general health may improve. In fact, the son of Victor Yanushkin, the Deputy Director of the decontamination unit in Gomel, who presided over our visit to Vetka turned up in Lancashire this August. The man in the photograph taken in the old lady's house in the contaminated zone near Vetka was the same as the man in the young boy's family photograph, propped up on the mantelpiece in a terraced house in Rochdale. To someone born less than 10 miles away in Bury, this was all a bemusing mixture of childhood memories, fantasy and reality. Our day ended at the Gomel children's hospital. Outside there was a row of 15 ambulances each inscribed with names of communities which had raised the money to buy them. Several were from Ireland and at least one from Glossop. The hospital was overcrowded but it was also clear that the staff, who were as caring, skilled and efficient as anywhere in Europe, were doing their best with overstretched resources. If we show someone a picture of these children without comment other than that the hospital was 'near Chernobyl' most people jump to the conclusion that these youngsters were all victims of radiation yet really all we saw were a lot of children who needed to be in hospital for various reasons. The direct and indisputable effect of the radiation is a significant increase in a variety of childhood cancers, cases of leukaemia and birth abnormalities. Most of such cases would not be in Gomel but rather in the modern cancer hospital in Minsk. The final number of cases of thyroid cancer attributable to the Chernobyl accident, for example, amounts to no more than several hundred throughout the whole of Belarus and most of these have been satisfactorily treated. But hundreds of cases of each of a variety of childhood cancers mounts up to thousands. Estimates of the eventual toll of deaths from cancer vary between 14 000 to 475 000 (Savchenko 1995). Much more difficult to quantify as what appears to be a markedly adverse effect on general health including higher than normal incidence of relatively minor ailments. This is thought to be due to continued exposure to radiation directly from environment and from food intake. It is difficult to evaluate this because records from before the accident may not be comparable with more recent ones and also because a fully comprehensive compilation and analysis of all the relevant medical data has yet to be completed. Accounts differ. The sober tones of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency report (1995) focus on thyroid cancer statistics whilst the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal Session on Chernobyl (1996) expressed serious disquiet that vested interests have ensured that the full story has never been made public. Radioactive iodine has a half-life of at most (depending on the isotope) eight days. But 90Sr and 137Cs will remain in the soil for perhaps centuries or even longer. Belarussians in contaminated areas must be exposed to levels of radiation above normal background from the environment. Despite control measures concerning the production and sale of agricultural products from the worst contaminated areas it seems likely that many people must eat contaminated food. It is impossible for us to assess in the space of a short visit the Belarussian public's attitude towards radiation. At the time of the accident it was said to be traumatic and that the medical problems were exacerbated by psychological and sociological factors. A few years later Communism collapsed and Belarus became an independent state for the first time in its history adding philosophical, political and economic uncertainty to its existing difficulties. Given that there is reason to fear that the Chernobyl reactor remains unsafe and that another serious leak of radiation may be about to happen, it appeared, at least at first, surprising that people we met were not more concerned than they seemed to be. They were unable to quote scientific data and medical statistics as one would expect of people in Britain should Sellafield ever get in the state in which Chernobyl remains. Of course, there is less freedom of the media to question government policy in Belarus than is the case in the UK but this is only part of the matter. When one lives in danger perhaps ones perception of it changes. If Gomel is your home town and you have no prospects of moving elsewhere, even if you wanted to, one needs to adapt psychologically in order to cope with it. Life in the London blitz must have been much more hazardous yet people coped. But we suspect that if we were to stay longer amongst Belarussians we might find that people feel much more deeply about what has happened to their country than our first impression suggested. The history of Belarus is full of sad events which its kind and thoughtful people have had to learn to live with. There is much we need to learn from a people and a territory that has suffered the worst nuclear accident in Human history. If ever there were even a modest nuclear military conflict or another nuclear reactor was to prove not as safe as they tell us, the result would be like it is around Gomel although perhaps much worse. The obscenity is that places we visited will remain uninhabitable for centuries. The Belarussians' dislike of statistics may be understandable but the World must have a balanced and well informed view of the extent of the Chernobyl disaster to make it less likely that such things happen again. The problems of dealing with the Chernobyl Reactor number 4 and the consequences of the accident are global problems which require global assistance. The economic problems of Belarus and the Ukraine are far too great for them to have to bear the cost alone. It is not someone else's problem. Radioactive sheep in Britain emphasise that we and the Belarussians share the same backyard.. And finally, can one really understand the true nature of Environmental Education until one has, like Gennady Karopa, developed it in the context of a place like Belarus? ReferencesOECD Nuclear Energy Agency (1995). Chernobyl ten years on: Radiological and Health Impact. http://www.nea.fr/html/re/chernobyl/c09.html Permanent People's Tribunal and International Medical Commission on Chernobyl (1996), Chernobyl, Environmental, Health and Human Rights Implications. Available from 'Low level radiation campaign', Ammondale, Spa Rd.' Llandrindod Wells, Powys LD1 5EY Savchenko V.K. (1995), 'The Ecology of the Chernobyl Catastrophe' .Parthenon Publishing, Paris. ISBN 1-85070-656-5 TEG news reader Dr Gennady Karopa spent most of the month of July in the UK and Italy, with the support of the BES, as our guest. He attended LifeScience 2000, visited Warwick University and several schools, (including, of course, Wakefield Girls' High Schoo). Malham Tarn Field Study Centre, Washington Wildlife and Wetland Trust in County Durham, a National Park visitor centre in Wensleydale, Grinton Lodge YHA, and an RSPB reseive at Black Toft Sands in Humberside. Then he came with us to Florence where he read a paper on the psychological aspects of environmental education as part of the BES education symposium. We have a number of ideas for future cooperation which are still under consideration. | ||||||
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teg
Issue 27
In the last edition of TEG news there was an article by Gennady Karopa about his native land, Belarus. We had been in touch with him for months by e-mail but on Monday 30th March, 1998, as the Austrian Airlines jet came to a standstill on the tarmac at Minsk airport we wondered what the great man would be like when we met him. As we emerged from customs, there he was waiting for us and as we hurtled along a remarkably uncongested motorway through a brown land still in the grip of winter we found he was just what we had expected. A few hours later we entered his family home at Buda Koshelevo, north west of the southern city of Gomel, less than 100 miles downwind from Chernobyl, and found it enough like a British house to feel like home yet different enough to be interesting. We were entertained to a meal in a room decorated with rich carpets on the wall as well as on the floor and with an impressive collection of Russian teapots displayed on shelves lining one of the walls. And the evening meal was washed down with vodka. 
Belarus used to be part of the Soviet Union but now it lies between Russia to the East, Poland to the West, Lithuania and Latvia to the north and the Ukraine to the south. In Belarus a statue of Lennin still broods over every town and village and there is still no democracy in the sense that we understand it. As well as being Head of Geography at Gomel State University, Gennady Karopa is president of the Belarussian National Green Class Association which is dedicated to Environmental Education. Environmental Education in a country of which at least 24% of the land surface remains affected by nuclear contamination arising from the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, where there is little freedom of the press and where the transition to a market economy remains a trauma is very different to what we were used to. At the University we were privileged to meet the Rector who told us of links with Aberdeen and Clairmont Ferrand and of his own time spent at the University of Warwick in the past. Then we met members of the Green Class Association and we found ourselves principle speakers in the first ever British-Belarussian seminar on Environmental Education. 
Whilst we there along the road an elderly lady, like a being from another world, came trudging towards us. She was pleased to meet visitors and she shook our hands. She said that robbers had destroyed her little house, and we presumed that she lived rough in the winter landscape of the contaminated zone surviving off what she could grow in contaminated soil. Nobody is forced to live there but some people, espcially the elderly, consider being relocated far more stressful than the radiation, and insist on returning. The evacuated areas have no public services and no police. Only a few weeks before our visit an old man had been killed by robbers wishing to steal his cow. Further south, Chetznians live illegally in the nuclear contaminated zone where. there is a convenient supply of empty houses and they feel safer than in their war-torn homeland. Like everything else, danger is relative... 
