Chernobyl has lasting effects

Chernobyl Day passed quietly in Jay County last week.
Except at our house.
The 30th anniversary of the worst nuclear plant disaster in history hit home.
It was a matter of friends.
I first met Denis Nazarenko in 2003. I was on my second visit to Central Asia, working on a project for the International Center for Journalists. I’d been to the region in 2002 on a five-week project and had been enticed to return for another round of training sessions.
Denis was a recent graduate of the American University of Central Asia. A classmate of his had interpreted for three of us in 2002, and Den had been tapped to translate while I did a week-long seminar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
It was spring, but there was still snow falling — flurries really — as the two of us walked down Frunze toward the direction of my hotel. The first day of the seminar was done, and I was pooped.
Denis had worked harder than I had, but he was something like 22 or 23 and had far more energy going for him.
I don’t think we’d walked more than a few blocks before he mentioned Chernobyl.
We’d been exchanging information about one another, talking about our families.
And Denis told me his father had been an engineer at the nuclear plant in a small city in the north of Ukraine.
His father, Den told me, had been sick with the flu and hadn’t gone to work that day, that day when the reactor started melting down.
Instead, the family was first ordered to stay inside, then later ushered out by people in protective gear, and — still later — exiled to Kyrgyzstan by Soviet authorities eager to keep survivors of the disaster from getting together and comparing notes. His parents were given new jobs and a new apartment, and were pretty much told to forget about that morning in April 1986 when things had gone horribly wrong.
There was one reminder: Every year the family was sent to a clinic for an examination to see if there was evidence of radiation poisoning.
It was in Bishkek, a year earlier, that I had met Svetlana, one of the professors at Denis’s university. She didn’t think much of Den. She had him pegged as a womanizer and a bit of a wastrel, and I couldn’t argue with that.
But they had one thing in common: Chernobyl.
Long before she was a professor, Svetlana had been a military translator, working in Kiev, Ukraine.
She was then in her 20s, single and as irresponsible as any other person that age.
So when some of her friends suggested they try to sneak into the “forbidden zone” around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, she thought it was a lark.
They took the train to Kiev and managed to get off the train without being noticed.
For a couple of hours, they goofed around in the empty city, taking pictures of one another in the deserted streets, roaming through houses that had been evacuated at a moment’s notice.
They had a ball.
And then, a few months later, Svetlana’s hair started to fall out. The evidence of radiation poisoning made itself known.
Fortunately, the effects were not long lasting. Her hair grew back. She had a son, who is now in his early teens.
Denis, also, seems to be OK. He married a Finnish woman — I was with them the night they met — had a couple of daughters, and later divorced. But he’s had no health problems.
At least none that have yet surfaced.
But for both of them, there will always be doubt. There will always be that worry that hits you in the middle of the night. There will always be a degree of fear.
There will always be, 30 years later, Chernobyl.