Child Profile, 1. Sergei Kravchenko, aged 14
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© UNICEF 2006 |
By John Varoli
In the twenty years since Chernobyl exploded and gave the world yet another synonym for destruction, a generation of children has grown up with no memory of the event. Like everyone in his class in the village of Novy Bobovichi, Sergei Kravchenko, aged 14, knows only what he hears from his parents and other adults.
Unlike other historical events, Chernobyl is not a topic relegated to the history books. It continues to shape Sergei's life and may even mean his early death. For five years after the blast, his parents continued to live a small village in Russia's Bryansk region on the border of Belarus. The area was hard hit by the Chernobyl fallout, but it wasn't until 1991 that the village was deemed unsuitable for human habitation.
Sergei's parents moved about 30 kilometers to Novy Bobovichi, and Sergei was born one year later, suffering from congenital heart defects. Sergei says little about his health. He'd rather show off his recent photos of Novy Bobovichi after returning home from the UNICEF photo workshop in Minsk in early March.
Sergei's photos are packed with emotion. Most show destroyed, abandoned and crumbling industrial sites – a ruined brick factory, derelict huts at a tourist resort that ironically was completed in early spring 1986, and rows of abandoned village houses. Among the more ominous is a shot of mushrooms in a jar..
“We still eat them even though they tell us mushrooms easily absorb radiation,” says Sergei nonchalantly, as he flashes to the next photo, which showed seven ten-ruble banknotes neatly laid in a semi-circle.
“I like this photo because it shows what the government thinks of us,” he says grimly. “These 70 rubles (just under $3) a month, which my parents get as compensation can't buy you anything.”
As they say in Russian, however, everything has a positive side. To discourage locals from burning wood from contaminated trees, Novy Bobovichi and other villages are now supplied with natural gas for heating. Asphalt roads have been laid to keep radioactive dust from rising into the air.
Previously, Sergei gave little thought to such things. The UNICEF photo master class taught him a number of valuable lessons.
“Before this, I had no idea of the scale of the Chernobyl accident and how many lives it effected in all three countries,” says Sergei, sitting in his school which has just 77 students, down from 200 in the late 1980s. “Now that I am better able to use a camera, I have a strong desire to use my photos to explain to the world how we live, and that 20 years later the problem of Chernobyl still exists.”
