October 22, 2005
Chernobyl's Sarcophagus, Grave Yards, Tears and Spin!
Our second day took off with a bad vibe. Jan is getting sick, he has a strong cold and a fever and he is not his chatty self. Jacob didn't tolerate last nights dinner and woke up with a strong diarrhea that kept him to himself. William was coughing more than ever - well, he is always coughing but this was worst. I had a very bad night sleep, it wasnt the feezing cold that kept me up all night. I was quite nervous about our trip into the 30 km exclusion zone around Chernobyl. And I was right to be nervous!
We met with our tour guide, her name was Rima, she was Russian but lived in the Ukraine most of her life. She spoke very good English and was excited but yet nervous about the fact that we were from Greenpeace. After all, she was a tour guide and her main job is to ensure that her group was happy. Not sure if happiness was the feeling we took home with us!
The minute we reached our first stop in the zone, the whole mood of the team changed, we were suddenly all right awake and curious about this massive "grave yard" with thousands of armoured vehicles, buses, cars, helicopters and few planes. Those were the vehicles the liquidators used to drive/fly to the exploded reactor area to decontaminate stuff and build the sarcophagus that now contains the reactors remains - I say stuff because no one knows what exactly they did decontaminate - and then drive them off to the grave yard where they have been waiting for years and years to finally be either decontaminated or treated as radioactive waste and buried underground.
Nothing I have done or seen in my life has prepared me for Pripyat - the town known today as the Ghost Town. Pripyat was the nuclear futurist town where the workers of Chernobyl and their families lived (there were around 50,000 of them). The town looked like a place that was once upon a time a happening spot. There were high rises, well paved streets, traffic lights and all the qualifiers of a middle sized town in Western Europe. Today, it looked like a movie set where all residents had to run for their life from the big scary aliens, spiders, zombies or even a big wave. In real life, residents of Pripyat, were told to leave their homes with only one suit case as they were promised they would return in two days....they never did.
During our lunch break, I managed to ask Rima how she feels about working in Chernobyl and what she thought about how the situation is being handled. I honestly was not looking for a big discussion (very unlike me!) or to make her feel uncomfortable. To me she seemed very relaxed about her job, the tour was very organized and everything around us ran very smoothly. Rima actually believed that it was safe to be where she is for that long a period and that the government has dealt with the accident adequately. She spoke for a bit about radiation levels and the doses she receives. Suddenly in the middle of her well thought response, she looks at me and says "I am a single mother with two kids, this is my job, do you want me to leave my job??!".
On the way home when we thought it was all over and that we would be back to our reality, we passed by a nice patch of land that was particularly "hillier" than the rest of the flat forest filled landscape. The van suddenly stopped and our guide shocked us with the true story behind those hills. The hills were houses that once formed a village near to Chernobyl. In order to decontaminate the area, the houses had to be demolished and buried under layers of sand and concrete and then topped with soil. For decoration, plants and trees were planted!! The creepiest thing though, was that in order to "honour" the houses, the hills were stabbed with a radiation symbols... To me this represented this villages eternal shame for being radioactive and contaminated.
No matter how hard I tried today to ignore the human factor and take our "guided tour" as the educational experience it is, my heart kept taking control and taking me back to the Pripyat town and it's people. The town's fair ground that never opened. Pripyat's entertainment center that residents wanted to come back home to in time for its opening night...All those dreams and promises that never happened and came true..........Towards the end of the tour I wondered, how would the world react if Pripyat was Hamburg or any other town in our world that has nuclear reactors nearby?? Are there any near you?