‘I promised Olya I would walk her up the aisle’
Krystina and Olya were four years old, inseparable as twins though bonded together by shared experience, not bloodline.
John watched the two small shaved heads bob as the girls busied themselves with their plates and bottles. Then he saw that they weren’t playing.
“Olya was feeding Krystina because Krystina can’t use her arms. Her food was on the ground and she was expected to eat like a dog.”
John, a builder from Leamlara outside Cork city, was at the Vesnova children’s asylum in southern Belarus as part of a crew of volunteers working on a renovation programme run by Chernobyl Children’s Project International (CCPI).
As the days passed and he watched Olya, who herself cannot walk properly, tend to the toilet and dressing needs of her even more severely disabled friend, he knew he would leave with more than just memories.
Four years later, the promise he took away with him to do something to make the girls’ lives better has turned into a mission. He travels to Vesnova twice a year to work on the building and spend time with the girls and they come to Cork to spend Christmas and the month of June with John and his wife, Moya.
“My three boys are grown up now with families of their own so the girls have a whole extended family here. They call my parents their grandparents. They call Moya and me their mama and papa. Moya bawled the first time that happened,” John says of the bond that has formed between them.
When they first arrived, “they were like two little rabbits — absolutely terrified. At meals they stashed food in their bags for later because they presumed there wouldn’t be any more”.
John Quaid, an IT manager with Dell in Limerick city also recalls a small, pale, wary child who came through CCPI to stay with him and his family in 1999. Palina Yanachkina was 10, the daughter of farmers who tilled land polluted by fallout from the nuclear disaster.
“They use well water even though radiation levels are high. The food they need to live comes from soil that makes them sick. It’s a vicious circle,” says John.
Palina was plagued with throat and kidney infections, her immune system too frail to protect her. It was hard to see how she would ever manage the heavy work of the fields which was all that lay ahead of her.
John and Fiona were determined to find an alternative. They got permission to bring Palina to Limerick for several months at a time and then to have her stay full time from 2005 so that she could sit the Leaving Cert. She is now studying industrial biochemistry at University of Limerick where she starts her second year on Monday.
“Her dream is to be a doctor and if she has to take the long way round, she’ll do that. When the days were tough — when she was trying to settle in to school and missed her family and then had to face the Leaving Cert — she never gave up. That’s the thing we admire about her most. She’s had so many challenges and she’s never given in.”
Simon Walsh of the Chernobyl Children’s Trust runs humanitarian aid convoys to some of the most isolated areas.
“You’re passing houses without windows or cookers in winter when its minus 30C. How any parent can raise a family in those conditions is beyond me.”
The Corkman and his wife, Deena, have had 20 children stay with them over the years but 10-year-old Nastia and her 11-year-old sister, Luda, are regulars.
“They’re the most gorgeous little girls, extremely close and so loving despite coming from very difficult circumstances. When they’re back in Belarus we’ve arranged for them to get a meal in school each day to make things easier at home and they’re really coming on.
We’ve made a long-term commitment to them and we want to see them grow up healthy and happy.”
Since the Belarusian government announced this week that it was suspending all further travel by its children, more than 1,000 Irish families have been worrying if they will ever again be able to welcome the youngsters they have come to love into their homes.
For John O’Riordan, the personal wrench of being parted from Krystina and Olya would be unimaginable but even more important is the medical treatment he has mapped out for the girls. Olya is due to have surgery here to rotate her twisted hip. It could give her a chance to fulfil her dream of being a dancer. Krystina too has surgery lined up so that she can be fitted with prosthetics.
“If they don’t get the operations, they will be sent to mental asylums when they are 18 because there is no place for physically disabled adults in Belarus. I’d never forgive myself if I let that happen.
“I made a promise to Olya that I would help to fix her legs so she could dance and I promised Krystina that one day I would walk her up the aisle. I’m not going to break that promise.”
Meanwhile, the Government has asked the Irish ambassador in Moscow to meet the authorities in Belarus and the Belorusian ambassador in London has been invited to Dublin for talks about the ban on Chernobyl children.
Foreign Minister Micheál Martin said they wanted to engage with the Belorusian authorities to ensure that the visits to Ireland continue.
chernobyl-international.com
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