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Chernobyl's Tiniest Victims
New York, April 26, 2006
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(CBS) April 26 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, but the tragedy lingers in heartbreaking ways.
Twenty years ago, a nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union exploded not once, but twice, soaking the atmosphere with 100 times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The plant is located on the border area between Ukraine and Belarus. At the time of the accident, about 7 million people lived in contaminated territories, including 3 million children. More than 5 million people, including more than a million children, still live in contaminated zones, according to the Chernobyl Children's Project International,
a not-for-profit organization that provides humanitarian and medical aid.
Two decades later, radioactive elements are spread through dust particles deposited in the earth by rainfall or enter the food chain through plants and animals, according to the organization. Millions continue to be exposed to these low doses of radiation, and their children are showing the tragic results. Many of them are born with disabilities so severe their parents either don't want them or can't help them.
While much of the world seems to have forgotten this ongoing tragedy, The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith met one extraordinary woman who is doing all she can to help.
Jennifer O'Dea, 30, is a pediatric occupational therapist from Hoboken, N.J., whose life changed when she saw an HBO documentary called "Chernobyl Heart," which opened her eyes to the plight of Chernobyl's orphans. "The world doesn't know about them," she told Smith. "They live at the end of a road and it symbolizes their life. They're at the end of the road for their life.
The tragic story inspired O'Dea to change the focus of her own life. "I've worked with children with severe deformities and I've never seen anything like these children before," she said "Nothing was being done about this. The children were laying in beds and … they weren't even able to have an environment where they had the independence to even grow and to be children.
O'Dea was asked to be one of the first Americans to travel to the Vesnova Orphanage, located southeast of Minsk near Bobruisk. She had to raise money to pay for her trip and for the therapy tools she needed for the children, including therapy balls, inflatable rolling equipment, and swings.
Her home video from the trip shows the children responding to her with smiles and laughter. She had just two weeks to treat as many children as she could and to train the staff to take over after she left. While she went to Vesnova with high expectations, she soon discovered it was the little triumphs that mattered most. "Just teaching a nurse or a caregiver there to sit a child up to feed them so that they can stay alive really is where you have to start," she said.
She described some of the children she worked with there, fighting back tears at the memory of their struggles. "Vlad is a beautiful child with cerebral palsy, and he is eight years old," she told Smith. "He seeks out love. And he's always aware of his environment. And he's a little guy that's trapped inside a very tight body.
O'Dea has been to Vesnova twice in the last year and is returning again this summer. She has made it her mission in life to make the world take note of this tragedy. "When I was there on my first trip, they took us down to the graveyard and an Irish nurse said to me, 'These children have no voice. Nobody can talk for them,'" O'Dea remembered. "She said, 'Go home and spread the word, do what you can, because otherwise, these children, no one will know that they even exist."
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Chernobyl 20th Anniversary Medical and Humanitarian Aid Convoy
Headed for Belarus This Month
Chernobyl Children's Project International to deliver $3.5 million in aid to
hospitals and orphanages in Belarus, and a mobile thyroid cancer
monitoring unit to the International Red Cross.
Convoy arrival
coincides with life saving pediatric cardiac surgery mission.
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New York -- (BUSINESS WIRE)—April 3, 2006. Chernobyl Children's Project International will mark the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident this month with a humanitarian and medical aid convoy worth $3.5 million dollars. The convoy will leave Ireland on April 9, and travel overland 3,000 miles through 9 countries en route to Belarus, a country severely impacted by the Chernobyl disaster. The convoy will arrive in Belarus on April 15.
The aid convoy – the 27th for Chernobyl Children's Project International (CCPI) – will consist of fifteen artic trucks carrying food, clothing, and medical supplies, and 27 ambulances. Chernobyl Children's Project International will donate the ambulances to hospitals, clinics, and orphanages in the most needy communities of Belarus, and volunteers will distribute the aid throughout the country.
A mobile thyroid monitoring unit will be donated to the International Red Cross in Belarus on April 19. Long time CCPI patron and volunteer Ali Hewson, who is co-creator of the EDUN socially conscious clothing line and wife of U2's Bono, will perform the hand-over.
The arrival of the aid convoy will coincide with CCPI's life saving children's cardiac surgery program, which is organized in partnership with the International Children's Heart Foundation. CCPI provides funding for the International Children's Heart Foundation to go to Belarus three times per year to operate on children at Minsk's children's cardiovascular surgery center.
Chernobyl Children's Project International is an international development, medical and humanitarian organization that works with children, families and communities who continue to be affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. They have delivered over $72 million in aid to Chernobyl affected regions of Belarus via overland convoy. The organization was founded in Ireland 15 years ago, and expanded into the United States in 2001. CCPI's work was featured in the Academy Award winning documentary “Chernobyl Heart."
For information contact Kathy Ryan, CCPI Executive Director, at kathyR@aol.com or 202-342-7667.
November 13 , 2005
Chernobyl's Children move therapist
By Tom Meagher
New Jersey Herald News
It all started with a movie.
Nearly a year ago, Paterson native Jennifer O'Dea saw a documentary on cable about the children affected by the Chernobyl disaster, children with severe deformities living in orphanages forgotten by the Western world.
"These kids blew me away. These kids have nothing," she said.
Within months, O'Dea, a pediatric occupational therapist who works at a school in Nutley and a private clinic in Clifton, contacted the film's subject, the nonprofit Chernobyl Children's Project International, to offer her services. When the group invited her to travel to Belarus to work with the orphans there, she raised nearly $5,000 from friends and family to make the trip. She had to go and help.
For nine days in October, O'Dea traveled with a team from the United States and a team of builders from Ireland to rural Belarus to help the children there afflicted with cerebral palsy, thyroid cancer, autism and other maladies from the radiation.
The people of Belarus largely live in denial of the public health catastrophe, O'Dea said. Those that acknowledge it live in fear - they call it radiophobia, she said. For the poor and ill-informed, disabled children are a burden and many families give them up or put them in orphanages. O'Dea's group trekked three and a half hours south of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to work with the Vesnova Children's Asylum.
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, nestled in remote Ukraine only miles from the Belarus border, exploded in 1986, the radioactive fallout spread across Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and northern Europe. The Soviet Union at the time downplayed the seriousness of the disaster; only years later did it become apparent what had happened. More than two-thirds of the radiation had blanketed much of Belarus.
Pavel Shidlovsky, the counselor of the Embassy of Belarus in Washington, D.C., said that more than 20 percent of the country is still contaminated and the effects of radiation will last for centuries. He said that his government supports the Chernobyl Children's Project International's work to help the more than 400,000 children in the contaminated regions.
"We need to spend a lot of effort and money trying to deal with and to cope with those problems. We value international assistance in this regard," Shidlovsky said.
Kathy Ryan, the executive director of Chernobyl Children's Project International, said when the 15-year-old organization discovered the Vesnova institution in 2002, it was woefully understaffed and in complete disarray. The stench of urine was overwhelming. The few staff members had no way to work with the children or to help them deal with their disabilities.
"It was pretty clear to me looking at them that those kids need the types of therapies that middle-class and upper-middle-class children in the United States get all the time," Ryan said.
O'Dea was the first occupational therapist to go to work with the project to help the orphans. She carried two heavy suitcases with her, filled with medicine and therapeutic tools. She also brought all of her own water and food for the trip.
She found more than 150 children in the orphanage. With the help of a translator, she worked with the children to improve their coordination, build their strength and to bring them comfort. Many of the children neither moved nor touched anyone else. When they had to go to the bathroom, they were set on buckets or pails on the floor. They did not know how to play.
"I cried every day I was there. It was so overwhelming," she said. "In the U.S., it would be so different."
O'Dea brought a therapy swing: a mesh, hammock-style hanging seat for the children. The gentle rocking soothed some of the most disturbed and emotional children.
By the end of the visit, O'Dea trained the newly hired nursing staff to continue the therapy she had begun with the children. Before she left, she gave away most of the supplies she had brought with her. She gave one of her empty suitcases to a teenager to carry his tools. He was a cobbler who repaired shoes for all of the other children. The Belarus government gives the children only one pair of shoes every two years.
Now, O'Dea wants to organize another team of therapists to go back and volunteer at th orphanage. She hopes to return within the year, even though she still reels when she remembers the conditions she saw. She feels like she could barely make a dent in the problems the children face, but she's committed to trying.
Ryan said she understood O'Dea's culture shock when she returned home to New Jersey.
"It's a hard trip to make," Ryan said. "It leaves an emotional impression on someone that doesn't go away for a long time."
Reach Tom Meagher |at (973) 569-7152 |or meagher@northjersey.com.
December 28 , 2005
Chernobyl: 20 Years On
The Irish Times -- Dear Madam – With increasing fuel prices the debate has reopened on the safety of nuclear power, relevant in the light of the approaching 20 th anniversary of the Chernoby l nuclear power plant disaster. Misinformation and deliberate distortion of the facts have caused much confusion to the debate. While the September 2005 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report says few have died, it has done nothing to enhance our learning and knowledge about the scale of the tragedy as it adds further confusion while missing the whole human and environmental trauma.
This report has further adding unwitting support for the governments of the affected region's policy declaring the Chernobyl disaster officially over. The IAEA report adds legitimacy to the government's policies of repopulation of previously evacuated and areas and re-cultivation of lands within the radioactive zones. The IAEA reinvention report on the consequences of the disaster will be used to support the building of a nuclear power station 25 miles from the exploded reactor on the territory of Belarus.
The IAEC report should also be greeted with some suspicion when you consider an agreement, signed in 1959, between the WHO (World Health Organization) and the IAEA , which hinders the WHO is its freedom to produce material regarding the consequences of Chernobyl without the agreement of the IAEA. The primary objective of the IAEA is to the promotion of nuclear power plants in the world. Article III of the agreements states: “The IAEA and the WHO recognize that they may find it necessary to apply certain limitations for the safeguarding of confidential information furnished to them."
Personally having spent much of October and November of 2005 in Ukraine and Belarus there is conclusive observable evidence within communities, old and young, of increases in cancer and genetic related illnesses since the Chernobyl disaster.
Listening and observing filmmakers and journalists ask the same questions time after time I have convinced that they are asking the wrong questions. They ask: “How many people have died? How many will die? Is this or that cancer or illness definitively caused by radiation? What is Chernobyl? How much radiation were you exposed to? Why do you all look so healthy? Show me the evidence?” These are questions with often non-specific answers or answers to that do not satisfy the required neat logic.
We seek absolutes in situations where there can be no absolutes, no definitive answers, for we ask the wrong questions. People expect to see something grotesque and distorted and are almost disappointed when people and things appear normal – the media are perplexed. But such expectations distract from the true effects, with no realization that any dose radiation is an overdose.
If we continue to seek only logical and rational answers we will constantly be diverted from the true picture – a picture of human fragility, a picture of how delicately balanced the relationship between man and nature is. I now believe that as long as we try and place Chernobyl within our existing understanding of catastrophes, understanding it will continue to allude us. Our experiences from other disasters are clearly inadequate because we are facing a realm of the unknown not previously experienced, requiring a new understanding, a new bravery, and a new kind of courage. Yours, etc., Adi Roche, Executive Director, Chernobyl Children's Project International, Cork Ireland.
August 8 , 2005
Chernobyl scientist Bandazhevsky released from Belarus prison
Nuclear scientist Yuri Bandazhevsky, who has been imprisioned since 2001 after criticising how the Belarusian government handled the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, was released on Friday 5 August.
Amnesty International considered Bandazhevsky a prisoner of conscience, and has campaigned for his release. The Belarusian government arrested him in 1999, and in 2001 sentenced him to eight years in a labor camp on charges of fraud.
Bandezhevsky, former head of the Gomel Medical Institute, had accused the government of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko of mishandling the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and of concealing the extent of the disaster. Bandazhevsky contended that the health effects of the Chernobyl disaster were getting worse rather than better, and that the contaminated areas were spreading due to forest fires and the movement of dust.
For background on Yuri Bandazhevsky and the controversy regarding the effects of Chernobyl on health, click here, to read an article by David Marples, Professor of History and Classics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
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