The true story and the real pain of Chernobyl children
The stories of people who survived from Chernobyl disaster, and how all they could do was to watch their loved ones die helplessly. Fragile children, as weak as they are, had to face the death, loss, and pain.
About 32 years ago in April 1986, the most catastrophic and disastrous nuclear reactor number four explosion occurred in Ukraine. It poisoned the environment near the area and the people who lived there. Environmentally speaking, people, plants and animals inhaled those radioactive particles, and it had contaminated their food and lands.
Many people were affected by the devastating disaster, but most of all, children were especially affected by it. Children in Chernobyl experienced something that people in other countries would have never imagined to experience.
According to “Voices From Chernobyl: An Excerpt,” the protagonist of the story had to just watch his wife and his daughter suffer from black spots on skin from intoxicated particles in the air. Suddenly, however, his seven years old daughter died. He knows that the pain of death was too difficult to handle for that little seven years old child, and that is why he could not forget her death even when people told him to.
It is still hard to know how many people died specifically from Chernobyl, because the poison in the body accumulates gradually, causing stagnant death. One thing for sure, though, is that Chernobyl provoked more cancer and caused more death than usual circumstances. Also, scientists have been debating whether it also increased birth defect or not. In the end, though, they concluded that the reactor explosion must have been the major problems for birth defects around the time when Chernobyl disaster had happened.
Many scientists had predicted that many disease were caused by Chernobyl reactor explosion even besides birth defect such as leukemia and cardio vascular disease. According to “One in four thyroid cancer cases registered near Chernobyl site likely caused by radiation exposure — new UN study,” children of age under 18 had been suffering from cancer as well, cancer called thyroid cancer.
Also, children were not the only victims who were suffering from the diseases. Adults were also not safe from it as well, especially from cancer. Due to contaminated environment and lethal particles floating in the area, people were partially forced to move out of their hometown.
Some older people who grew up in the town refused to leave and wanted to stay there while most of the young people and their children wanted to move out of the town. The population in the town decreased slowly, and the people did not comeback to town even after a long period of time since the explosion had happened.
However, one good thing had had happened from the disaster: because of the absence of people in the town, huge and wild animals like wolves, deer and wild boar also began to appear. Despite all the depressing facts, I just wanted to point out that there was at least one good thing that had happened because of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Luckily according to Wood, “ the impact of radiation on wildlife within the exclusion zone is much less than the impact of humans.”
Besides the protagonist that I mentioned above, there are many other children and parents who were also affected by the Chernobyl calamity in other ways. Certainly, there have been many people who were physically influenced by it, but most of the people were emotionally and mentally affected.
The author of the article “The child of Chernobyl,” was born after the explosion. The writer said that the birth rates have been falling drastically after the catastrophe, because it was likely for babies who were born right after the disaster to be more exposed to food poisoning and lung problems.
The author of the article shared that while he was in England, children of her age would refuse to eat with him, because she was labeled as a “child of Chernobyl” (Astrasheuskaya). Therefore, children of Chernobyl had to not only go through physical deficiency, but they also had to suffer mentally from how others had labeled them as and had classified them as.
The two protagonists of the stories are the helpless victims of Chernobyl nuclear explosion disaster. They both had to accept the death and the misery in the end. They must have been both physically and mentally deteriorated and exhausted.
The people of Chernobyl are still looking for the possible solution from the calamity, and many children from that period of the time are still trying to recover from them. It is, surely, hard to deny how difficult it was for them to recover partially even after thirty years later, because it takes a lot of effort and time to forget the death of their children and the pains that the children of Chernobyl had experienced as a little kid.
Thus, the pain and the suffering that children of Chernobyl and people who survived from that catastrophe still remains distressed, and they are still attempting to recover from those despairs and torments.
It is hard to recover fully, but many people believe that it is still possible. There were many emotional, physical, and mental pains, but there they know that there is still hope, just like how the wild animals are flourishing now there due to people moving out of the town to avoid poisonous particles that were floating in the air.
