Escape from Chernobyl

Today's culture craves bad news. Every morning, millions of people around the world flip on their television sets and click immediately to their favorite news channel. Rugged reporters in the thick of the most recent disaster, possibly thousands of miles away, instantaneously beam their breaking stories of death and destruction into the homes of viewers in terry cloth robes, comfortably sipping their freshly brewed coffee.

Everywhere we turn, another shocking headline in the daily newspaper screams in our face about the latest crisis on hand: A suicide bomber on a bus in Israel! Famine in Somalia! A new SARS outbreak in China! A serial killer on the loose in Washington, D.C.!

If it bleeds, it leads--or so the saying goes. The demand for gratuitous violence and gore has reached an unprecedented level in today's society. Remember the infamous news coverage in 1993 of a dead American soldier being dragged by a jeering mob in the dusty streets of Mogadishu? How about the gut-wrenching scenes of helplessly trapped people leaping to their deaths from the windows in the towers of the World Trade Center? At some point along the way, we have acquired a terribly morbid taste for news.

What happened to the Cinderella stories and the fairy tales with happy endings? Do they still exist--and where can we find them? Sift through the rubble of a lethal landslide in Venezuela and the pile of dismembered civilians in the live-telecast of the latest Iraqi bombing campaign, and you find the untold stories not deemed headline-worthy because death was thwarted, destruction avoided and trouble cleared.

Jog your memory back to April 26, 1986. In the midst of the Cold War and behind the Iron Curtain the worst nuclear accident in the history of the world struck northern Ukraine. The uncontrolled nuclear meltdown of the Chernobyl power station caused 190 tons of highly radioactive material to be hurled into the atmosphere. The explosion was over 200 times stronger than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 16 million times stronger than the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. A 1995 report by the United Nations estimated that approximately nine million people were affected by the disaster--three to four million of whom were children.

Soviet officials compounded the situation by not publicly announcing what had happened for several days. On the day of the accident, Soviet officials ordered that the radioactive clouds be artificially seeded to rain over the territory of Belarus, so that Chernobyl's radioactive plume would be minimized as it drifted past Western Russia, Northern Ukraine, Poland and Sweden.

"While Chernobyl has long since disappeared from headlines and newscasts, it is more than a historical footnote," says the information brochure of the American Belarusian Relief Organization. "Its effects continue to be recorded in the lives and bodies of the children of Belarus."

Seventy percent of the radioactive material landed in puddles on Belarusian pavement. For eight days, iodine 131 decayed in the thyroid glands of over 2 million Belarusians, in whom it caused a surge in the incidence of thyroid cancer. There has since been a 100 percent increase in childhood leukemia and a 250 percent increase in congenital birth defects and infant mortality. Digestive tract disorders, immune deficiencies and eye cancers abound among the youngest generation of Belarusians today.

Over 90 percent of the children in Belarus have been contaminated by radiation and will continue to be affected by the harmful radiation emitted from decaying particles of cesium 137, strontium 90, plutonium 241 and its various decay products for many years to come.

Long neglected under communist rule, the Belarusian health care system is in a state of disrepair. The entire nation has a total of 131,000 hospital beds, and in 1994, there only were 42 doctors for every 10,000 patients. With the growing needs of the population, which are compounded under the stress of Chernobyl's legacy, the system is grossly overwhelmed.

Despite the nation's lingering communist social safety net, the average monthly salary in Belarus is only $10, leaving families absolutely no additional money for warm clothing in the winter or well-balanced, albeit radiation contaminated, meals for dinner--let alone medical care and prescription medicine.

This is where children's organizations such as ABRO enter. ABRO regularly sends children living in radiation contaminated areas on visits to the United States. And in this manner, the kids are given the opportunity to have a brief respite from the harmful effects of Chernobyl and temporarily recuperate in a radiation-free environment. American host families adopt the children for six weeks and feed, clothe and love them.

The major catch, however, is that children with diagnosed medical problems are not invited to come.

"All of the programs that will invite children of Chernobyl on these trips don't want to take kids that have pre-existing conditions," says Coyne. "And it's precisely those kids with pre-existing conditions that the doctors need to help, but people are just too afraid to treat them."

The staggering cost of health care in America is also a major reason why relief organizations balk at sending sick Belarusian kids to the States. Although host families are perfectly fine with setting an extra place at the dinner table and spoiling the kids with shopping sprees for new clothing and school supplies, many are more hesitant when the children need $4,000 braces to fix a jaw abnormality and expensive MRI tests to find a tumor lodged near the child's brain. The money is often simply not available to provide the necessary medical care for these kids.

This is where ABRO exits and Helping Children steps in, according to Coyne. Ten years ago, a lucky stroke of fate sent Coyne, a childhood polio survivor, on a mission to fix a set of dilapidated iron lungs and respirators in the basement of a hospital in Belarus. Duct tape and wires in hand, she not only salvaged the old machinery, but also befriended a pediatric oncologist, Dr. Sergei, who had a dream that one of these days, sick Belarusian children would be invited to go to America, like the healthier kids, so that they could finally get the medical attention they need. Miraculously, he committed the apprehensive Coyne to the task of making this dream come true.

"I remember telling my husband about the idea and him telling me, 'you know Beck, you can do it! Why not?'" says Coyne. "And when he said that, I thought to myself, 'Oh, why did you have to say that!'"

Because funding was still as much a problem for Coyne as it was for other Belarus relief organizations, she called up doctors in the Triangle area, and asked them to treat a group of sick children with potentially terminal illnesses.

"I have incredible gall. I mean, who did I think I was, to walk into a doctor's office or call up a doctor and say, 'Will you please provide this medical treatment for free?'" says the unabashedly grinning Coyne. "But I figured all they could say is no! and slam the door or phone."

To her pleasant surprise, many Duke doctors did not hang up, but instead agreed to offer their services on a pro bono basis. For the past nine years, Coyne has been able to "hand-pick" the kids who get to fly to Durham for six weeks, and get physicals, eye exams, diet evaluations and treatment by Duke Medical Center health care providers.

"It was an easy decision to work with the kids from Belarus," says Dr. Michael Frank, chair of the department of pediatric services. "We're in the job of trying to help children. That's the life's work we have taken on. If we can, we help out. It's as easy as that!"

Dr. Lloyd Redick, a retired pediatric endocrinologist and professor from the Medical School also pointed to a more pragmatic reason for treating the Belarusians: It was a tremendous learning experience for doctors, students and residents at the Medical School.

"How many nuclear accidents, like Chernobyl, with such widespread medical implications have happened in history?" says Redick. "We are never going to see this kind of gamma radiation exposure in patients."

With the help of Duke physicians, children's lives are saved, one child at a time.

"In my opinion, the doctors down at Duke Hospital are fantastic, very giving people," says Harvey Ellis, a four-time host father. "They have done so much for nothing. Those people really are super."

A couple years ago, a team of cornea specialists at the Duke Eye Center performed a cornea transplant surgery on a Belarusian girl, Nadia, who was born with a corneal defect. The material, time and equipment necessary for this surgery were free of charge for Nadia, who could hardly differentiate between light and darkness before the operation.

"When Nadia left, she could almost read," says Redick. "This sort of medical care is simply not available in Belarus."

The oldest Belarusian on this year's trip is 14-year old Yula. She grew up in a small village, 20 miles away from a dead zone, where the radiation exposure was so concentrated that no one living in the area survived the artificial rain that dropped on the town. Her brother has cancer and her mother is also suffering from cancer in addition to a number of other health complications. When Yula was seven years old, doctors noticed classic signs of developing digestive tract cancer in her.

"The first year she was with us, Yula was constantly in abdominal pain," says Coyne. "But by improving her diet, getting her out of the contamination for six weeks every year and taking care of certain health issues, doctors at Duke helped devise a special diet that seemed to help her digestion improve. Because of the care she received here at Duke, she has not gone into cancer--but it took her coming here multiple times to give her this opportunity to live."

The physically and mentally handicapped of Belarus are barred from working and are cast aside as the dregs of society, branded with the label, 'Invalid.' Coyne brought back a Belarusian boy, who is blind in one eye, because he's considered an Invalid.

"In Belarus, if you're a disabled person, you will be institutionalized. There's no educational opportunities offered to you and you're not expected to work. You just become... a thing," says Coyne. "Their society isn't constructed in such a way to permit someone with a disability to have access or to be able to function. People are afraid; the government is afraid of them."

Some deformities can be treated when the right doctors are there. Katya, for example, will be evaluated by a Duke facial reconstructor this summer, to see if her deformed cleft palate can be fixed.

Another tiny Belarusian girl, also named Katya, who has trouble seeing clearly, is being evaluated for the possibility of a malignant tumor growing behind an optic nerve. She was originally not part of Coyne's group, but was quickly handed off to her by ABRO, which was "not able to cope" with the likelihood of Katya having a potentially life-threatening illness, according to Coyne.

Alena, who also originally arrived in the States with ABRO's group of Belarusian children, was sent to Coyne when her ABRO host family got spooked by "the little girl's incessant coughing" and her tuberculosis test coming back positive, says Konstantin Penner of ABRO.

Families in Belarus, a country still marred by the Cold War propaganda that Americans are evil, send their children across the Atlantic to a land of strangers in an "act of desperation," says Coyne. An old man in Belarus once confronted her and told her he believed that Americans eat their children and American children kill their mothers and fathers. The decision by parents in Belarus to send their children to America is rivaled only by the decision made by the host families here. Welcoming a sick child who does not speak a word of English into your home for six weeks can certainly be a daunting task.

"When I first read an ad in a newsletter seeking host families for a group of Belarusian kids, the first thing I thought was, 'There's no way I'm going to get involved with that!'" says Ellis, who is hosting Igor for the second time.

Another returning host family was also initially hesitant about hosting Belarusian children in its home.

"It was very frightening at first. We hosted two seven year-old orphans who spoke no English, and we wondered, 'How in the world are we supposed to communicate with them?'" recalls Gretta Holloway, a three-time host mother. "I could never have pictured myself doing this in a million years--taking in kids that weren't mine and loving them. But no matter how big the challenge looked and how scary it was at first, there has never been one day with the Belarusians that hasn't worked out fine."

The Holloway family's Belarusian orphans, Marsha and Artym were abandoned at birth by their biological mother and, before they were forced to live in a crowded orphanage, a family member took them in for a period of time and abused them.

"They've experienced much pain. You say something about their early years and they just shut down, and don't talk," says Holloway. "All we can do is just cuddle 'em, and kiss 'em and love 'em while they're here."

The cuddling and loving, however, comes with a pretty steep bill. Transportation from Belarus to America alone costs $950 per person. It's for this reason that Coyne's vision for Helping Children is to start a medical collaboration between doctors in Belarus and the Medical Center.

"Because you can only bring so many kids into this country for treatment, what I would really like to see happen is to work with medical professionals in both countries," says Coyne. "To really influence improvement, you're going to really have to go to the people who can do the task there--and help them improve the medical treatment there."

Dr. Allan Carlson, the Duke cornea surgeon who worked with Nadia in the past, has already agreed to work with physicians at the University of Minsk in Belarus. For three years now, Dr. Michael Freemark, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Medical Center, invited a doctor from Belarus to shadow him and "show him how it's done in America." In this way, Belarusian doctors will be able to learn how to better care for the rising number of patients they are seeing.

Once upon a time, Belarus was a nation characterized by sloping ridges and softly rolling hills bordered by vast birch and aspen forests. Seventeen years after the catastrophic nuclear explosion in Chernobyl, the landscape is now blighted by the remnants of bulldozed villages, where all inhabitants have died from radiation-related diseases. Many have forgotten about this dying country, believing that the mistakes of the past will go away as the victims of the horrible tragedy slowly dwindle; they are deaf to the millions of children crying out in pain, as the deadly cancers spread in their bodies. But from time to time, as happens in fairy tale stories, a team of rescuers has swooped down and changed the fate for some of these kids.