Chernobyl Children's Lifeline - Mid Surrey Link

The school spring holiday was once more the trigger for a massed family expedition across Europe to Belarus. We had been invited to visit our foster son Sergei in his home village of Berezhnoye, and he was looking forward to travelling with us as we went on to roam around Belarus visiting many of the young people and leaders who had stayed with the Link since it began in 2002.

We drove to Sergei's home, a distance of 1300 miles from our door to his. We stayed in Belarus a total of 12 days, visiting so many people that this could not hope to be a diary of our time there. Having visited as a family in 2005, and by myself in 2003, we were able to notice many changes, and also perhaps to see slightly deeper into Belarusian life than is possible at a cursory glance.

Something that has not changed is the enormous welcome extended by everyone we visited. Even in the poorest homes we were sat at tables groaning with food, and prevailed upon to eat more than we could manage. I vividly remember the day we were booked for breakfast (Sergei's home), lunch (Sergei's grandmother), and dinner (Sergei K, a Christmas visitor from 2006). We then met Vanya and Sasha's mothers on a flying trip to see where Sergei's mother works, and were invited to visit them in the evening. We agreed, but I made sure that Sergei translated my pleas for no food. They agreed, but begged us to visit for coffee. At 7.00pm we ate from a huge buffet. At 9.00pm we arrived at Sasha's - another huge buffet. Shortly after 10.00pm we got to Vanya's house - you guessed it! That is not to say that these families would normally eat like this. It is a national characteristic that it is impossible to welcome someone to your home for however short a period without feeding them as well as you possibly can. It made us feel awkward on a number of occasions that we were sure that the family we were visiting really could not afford to put that amount of food on the table, but they were delighted to have us visit their home, and would be offended if we did not eat as much as possible. It's really hard to face gherkins, salami, pickled tomatoes, rye bread, cream gateau and champagne at gone 11.00 at night, particularly having been forced to eat a huge dinner at 7.30!

An observation that might help hosts when despairing over what their guests will or will not eat is that at practically every meal each person was given a small plate and a fork, with an array of dishes on the table for everyone to help themselves from. Meat was always identifiable as salami, fried chicken and so on; we were never offered stews or casseroles, and potatoes were present at more or less every meal, usually mashed. This does not mean that mealtimes when the children are in England must be strictly replicated, but if you are having trouble with children struggling with knives and forks, or picking at what you have put on their plate, then it might help you to know what they are used to. Drinks were generally compote - the juice obtained by stewing fruit with a large amount of water and sugar. Blackcurrant compote tasted just like Ribena! However, on this visit even Jonathan, our 10 year old was considered old enough to be given wine and champagne!

The standard of living is rising fast in Belarus. Alongside that, the cost of living is rising fast too. Sergei had been given videos of Dr Who - he told us sadly that their video player had broken; it was not possible to buy a new one because everyone wanted DVD players now, but they could not afford a DVD player. Satellite dishes sprout from most apartment blocks, no matter how run down and squalid the surroundings. At an estate we visited on the outskirts of Minsk we were told it would be safe to leave our car outside the block of flats. When we visited in 2005 we had to take it to the lock up car park every night and pay for it to be watched. The Metro system had been extended right to the outskirts, and we were able to travel in to the centre of Minsk very easily.

Many more homes we visited this time had indoor flushing toilets and baths. President Lukashenka has had a project for some years now of building new homes in the villages, and we were privileged to visit two. They are easy to spot - rows of completely identical houses, and we became expert at picking them out, even down to changes in design, labelling them "this batch", "the one before", and "an earlier batch"! "This batch" has gutters and downpipes from their corrugated iron roofs, and are decorated internally (poorly) by the builders before the walls have dried out. "The one before" had no gutters or downpipes, meaning that the water pouring from the roof is breaking up the surrounding concrete path, and were left to be decorated by the new owner. The new houses have a bathroom and toilet, with running water, and a "fitted" kitchen. They have two bedrooms, and a living room, and thus provide far more accommodation than many of the older wooden houses. Each house stands in its own strip of land which the owner can plough borrowing a horse plough, and plant with potatoes, carrots and so forth. Many have a block built shed at the back housing the family pig, and chickens - we met "Boris", who will be next year's salami! Heating is provided by a wood burning boiler off the entrance lobby, powering radiators and hot water. Book your morning bath - your host will have to get up two hours early to light the boiler, and if you come in cold late at night it's better to go to bed than to wait to warm up!

The wood to fire the boilers is bought - although the villages are surrounded by forests the wood cannot be taken from there. The "men" of the household will ensure there is a regular supply chopped small enough for the boiler. Sergei, aged 13, made sure we understood that he must chop a week's supply of wood before we left on our travels. He then went out in the rain to stand and chop wood for his mother. He was using a full sized axe, had no protective clothing, and this had been his task for some years now. I remember talking to a leader about a 10 year old chopping wood for his mother, but that did not really impact on me until I watched Jonathan and Anna (10 and 13) watching Sergei chopping and begging to have a go! Ex Boy Scout Anthony was able to assist by teaching Sergei to use a wedge to split a resistant log. At the end of our visit we went into the forest for a barbeque with Sergei and his extended family, and watched Sergei and his uncle having a spirited wood chopping contest! We were very aware that the Belarusian child's experience of childhood is so different from that of our own children. Their level of responsibility is often so much higher, and what we would consider to be risk taking can be part of their daily lives. A 10 or 11 year old village boy might spend the day out in the forest with his friends, having got there on a bike he cycles by standing on the pedals because he cannot reach the saddle. He will climb trees, swim, fish, cook the fish on a fire he has lighted, and come home when it is getting dark. He will probably have no watch to tell him when to be home by, and no phone to stay in touch with anyone, or for use in emergency. Whilst the roads are usually quieter than ours, the main road through a village can have lorries roaring through, and the levels of deaths on the road have been high. Street lighting is minimal. There is now a widely publicised national campaign aimed at getting children to wear fluorescent bands when walking along the roads - in one village our children were given bands to wear before we were taken on a walk through the village in the evening. This has had a big impact on the level of fatalities.

Despite visiting many families, we met far fewer cows than we had in previous trips! They are still very much part of village life - where else would you lose your chauffeur around a village because he had to go and catch his cow, who had escaped looking for a bull?! He came back eventually reporting that he had caught the cow, and a

Whilst seeing the many small ways life in Belarus is changing, we were constantly aware that there is still poverty and difficulty, but that even more important than that is the knowledge that Chernobyl Children Lifeline's reason for being is not relief of poverty, or holidays for poor children. It exists because of the difference we can make to the lives of children growing up with the long term health effects of the Chernobyl disaster, and those children are affected as much by the contamination whether they have satellite TV and a flushing toilet, or a cow in the back garden and an earth closet.

And a final similarity? Despite using chopped wood and burning it down in order to have that last night barbeque instead of using pre packaged charcoal, it's not only the British who stand out in the rain eating kebabs!