Hope
of CHERNOBYL
Hope
of CHERNOBYL
This is a page to tell the whole world about Chernobyl. This is a page to let you know that someone in the world may need your warm hand and open heart to make it through, to learn how to live again. Bless Us God, and let's pray for the light of life and hope will never be turned off...
The name of my country is Belarus. We have a beautiful legend that our country is a land under the white wings of storks, who takes care of people living in Belarus.
On the 26th of April, 11 years ago, when I was a small girl, my best friend, Angela, and I were playing in the yard near our school. An unusually bright sun was shining and a fresh wind was blowing. It was a beautiful day, but I suddenly began to feel afraid. This fear occupied all my senses: I knew something dangerous would happen. Suddenly I asked my friend, "Are you afraid to die?" She just looked at me as if I were mad, then we continued our game. I can not explain my feral fear even now. Everyone experiences unexplained fear sometimes, a premonition of impending events, helpless to escape what will happen.
I remember Angela's eyes; they were deep-violet. Soon it began raining the same color. I know there is no bloody-violet rain, but now I think that the drops of the rain were bloody. Children love rain, and being children, we danced and laughed in the rain. It began to get cold; we decided to go home.
A few days later, my mother asked if I had been playing in the rain that day. I answered, "Yes, the day was very nice, wasn't it?" My mother didn't smile; she just said "I love you!" Suddenly the fear I felt some days ago came back to me.
As I grow older, I hear the word "Chernobyl" more and more often. This beautiful rain was a rain of death, the rain of Chernobyl. Sometimes when I think about this man-made disaster, I ask myself, "Was this horrible atomic disaster destined to happen?" Should one person be allowed to influence the life of other people to this degree? We have at our finger tips the power to extinguish life as we know it or; to make it a utopian existence, however, are we capable of controlling this power? At other times I think it was somebody's foolish error, a man-made disaster, which will never happen again. Who knows?
The Doctors kept me in hospitals for, because of my low resistance to infections and contagious diseases; a direct result of the Chernobyl fall-out. They told my parents that I was lucky I suffered no more serious effects than this.
Angela passed away 6 years after the tragedy because of the disease of the blood. She told me long before her death that she remembers my question, "Are you afraid to die?"
In my dreams I look into her eyes and my fear returns. Have you ever looked into the eyes of your dearest childhood friend, who knows she is dying? It is an experience I can neither forget nor describe the emotional impact. Our lives changed forever due to somebody's stupid mistake. We lived in the wrong country at the wrong time.
Today, 70% of the children in my country are sick, because of this accident. I don't blame people who were responsible for this accident. I feel tiredness and resentment that I can do nothing to stop the children's suffering and death.
Now in some parts of my country you will see empty houses, fields and empty nests of white storks. You will not find white birds there any more, only ravens flying around the churches and the lakes. I know for sure that the new meaning for the name of my country is "Land of the Black Angels."