Dhima at his Grandma’s house with winter pumpkins
When I volunteered to accompany Friends of Chernobyl’s Children (FOCC) Co-ordinator Cecilia Hammond on her annual trip to Belarus, I knew it wasn’t going to be a holiday…
The plan was to visit the 22 children who stayed with the Helpston & District host families in the summer for a month’s respite care away from the contaminated air of Mogilev.
As the trip takes place during October, the weather wasn’t going to be warm and sunny, but I can honestly say that I really wasn’t prepared for the stark contrast, between Belarus and our comfortable country, homes and lifestyles.
Everything is so much tougher over there. The weather is dark, damp and dreary (and of course it will now be intensely cold at this time of the year). In the countryside, I saw no beautiful country cottages, attractive stone buildings, or historic old churches as we are fortunate to have so abundantly here. There is very little in the way of interesting architecture, just lots of trees and fields and flat sodden brown land (okay, so I know we aren’t exactly blessed with mountain ranges here in our villages either).
In the centre of Mogilev the vast majority of people live in concrete apartment blocks, there are thousands of them – bunched together unattractively across the city’s skyline.
In the countryside surrounding Mogilev, where about half of our children’s families are from, the people live mainly in wooden or breezeblock single-storey buildings, the families had outside toilets, many have no running water and heating systems that are archaic with lethal Russian ovens which may heat the house, but have apparently been responsible for many tragic house fires and deaths.
Travelling is not easy, the major roads look promising enough as they leave the City but many tailed off to dirt tracks and I have a very vivid recollection of a group of helpful villagers pushing our Driver Andre’s VW Golf out of a sandy ditch which we’d just disappeared down – we were on our way to visit two of our children, brothers Raman and Dhima who live with their Grandma, and are the furthest away from Mogilev.
As we approached their house on foot, I really began to think that I’d arrived on the set of Fiddler on The Roof and fully expected Topol to burst into song from behind the next corner. It all looks on the surface to be rather quaint, their wooden cottage has a pretty picket fence around it, and there is a Heath Robinson-style water well with a bucket hanging from it in the front garden.
There were pumpkins and squashes piled up haphazardly in their yard and huge amounts of apples stored in their shed for the winter – but I had a sense that survival is the name of the game during the winter months. They have no method of transport other than by foot and are a long way from shops and services – there would be no chance of an ambulance rescuing a sick person from these areas.
Cecilia had a military-style plan to ensure that during our week we visited all of the children and families, we took them food supplies and clothes, and were wonderfully entertained by many of them in true Belarusian style (fizzy wine and salted cucumber early on the Sunday morning was a particular high point which I don’t think any of us will forget easily – thanks to Staz’s irrepressible grandma!).
The FOCC charity office in Mogilev are wonderfully well organised and totally committed to ensuring that as many truly needy children are enrolled in the project as possible, and to that end were determined to show us potential new children who desperately need help and support.
It was clear to see how much better the children and families who have been involved with our project for the past three years, seem to be thriving than some of those we visited for the first time.
The food and money and the care for the children seems to give the families enough hope to continue battling on, in what are for most of them very difficult circumstances.
While I don’t particularly want to make it a regular date in my diary to return each year to Mogilev, I recommend the experience to my fellow Host Families, it’s a very salutary one and one which has confirmed my belief that in helping these children, and enabling them to visit us each year we do indeed do ‘a very good thing’
If anybody is interested in knowing more about the project or would like to be considered as a future host family please contact Cecilia Hammond via email at: focc_helpston@msn.com
