I met the sweetest girl yesterday. Polina had the brightest smile and the cutest button nose face. I wanted to see this girl smile again and again – for what a wonderful sight it was. I’m sure you would have felt the same.

Igor swung open the metal gate and we walked down the short path to the wooden house, square and squat, out of which stuck a silver chimney midway along one side. A dog barked uncontrollably and took a run at us; stymied by a wire fence, it fell silent in disappointment – not a sentiment I shared. Next to the path, roof tiles lay on the grass and there was a pile of whole and broken bricks next to the shell of a house. Only an hour from Kiev, these tired building materials in this tiny village were a world away from the grand and stately pastel-yellow and blue and green baroque buildings that gave Kiev’s centre such self-confidence and elegance.

Turning round to me as we walked, Igor explained that wooden house where Polina lived was formerly the family’s sauna. The adjacent half-rebuilt house had been under construction for four years as the family struggled for money, “there was fire there and now they live in the sauna”. Each word was separated by a short pause, leaving me constantly in anticipation of the next and unsure when Igor had finished. Igor and I shared a similar approach to both grammatical accuracy and hair: largely an afterthought, and generally swept aside in the busy-ness of life; given just enough attention to ensure it did not get in the way.

However, communication was never an issue when Igor spoke about his passion: “rising [sic] the lives of children” and his “child dream”, his eyes glittering and at their corners miniature mountain ranges rose as he focused his gaze on me. I was intrigued but we were at the sauna door and beckoned, “let’s go in, you will like meeting her”. He knocked and opened the door as if knowing it would be open, and he welcome. Stooping a little, I followed. Inside were two rooms – one containing a small kitchen and stove, the other room had a bunk bed and a tiny desk. It was warm but cosy to the point of crampedness.

There was Polina, with her impish smile breaking out from her face, framed by a woolly hat and brown hair, dressed in a burgundy jacket. I immediately warmed to her, “Hi, how are you?” I asked. “Good!” she smiled. Sergei, an older man, with a lean face with a fair scraggle of grey hairs flecking the brown, which rested on a reassuringly powerful frame, swung into view. “She speaks English you know, she likes to practice”. I looked across at Polina, who looked set to bounce off the bed, a bundle of life and energy.

 “How old are you Polina?”

 “I am…” she began, in English. “Twelve” she finished with a brief smile, in Russian.

“Are you ready to go to Kiev?” asked Igor, the mountain ranges becoming sand dunes.

Polina nodded as she grabbed a pad of paper and a selection of colouring pencils. Sergei bent down and scooped Polina up and we made our way to the car. Driving to Kiev, Polina told me how she loved drawing landscapes, her chin shyly lowered into her coat as her eyes ignited, “I love their beauty” she told me. Sergei, her father, had been born near Tomsk in Siberia but had moved to this region decades earlier and spent much of his working life in a glass-making factory. Intrigued, I asked him how his life had been before the breakup of the Soviet Union. “We had everything. Everyone earned the same, and it was enough. Language didn’t matter, there were free schools and free healthcare”. He stared out car window, his face expressionless.

This last point must have been a point of conflict for Sergei. Squeezed amongst several bags in the boot of Igor’s car was Polina’s wheelchair, stepping in for legs which couldn’t support her. These two wheels indicated that she would have been consigned to a parallel existence, hidden from society and separated from her family, if Soviet practices still held sway. During the Soviet era disabled people officially did not exist. By contrast, in present day Ukraine, it is free and high quality healthcare that does not exist; I didn’t ask how much the impending operation would cost, or how it would be paid for.

At a fastfood restaurant on the outskirts of Kiev, I waved goodbye to Polina, Sergei and Igor and descended to the metro to bypass the sluggish traffic, eager for an early night before an earlier morning alarm.

A bright yellow roadside stall appeared through the window as the minibus rolled up to a checkpoint, around which men in fatigues and masks loitered. Through the glass I saw fridge magnets, gas masks and red t-shirts proclaiming “Enjoy Chernobyl - Die Young” in the script of the world’s favourite fizzy drink. I yawned, again. Three double espressos and I was still tired – what was wrong with me?

After a short hiatus – during which several of my young Ukrainian tour companions purchased some inessentials, though disappointingly the glow-in-the-dark condoms remained untouched – we continued towards the town of Chernobyl. I stared out the window, waiting for the trees to thin and fade away and a desolate landscape to stretch into the distance. Before this happened, we passed the hulking town sign of Chernobyl, built like a concrete wall with a hammer and sickle and power plant jutting out in relief. We hopped from the minibus to take photos, and I popped my rucksack on the ground, to move encumbered for the perfect photo op to feed the insatiable Instagram.

“Stop! Pick up that bag!” shouted our guide, Dennis, “nothing must touch the ground!”. I quickly picked up my rucksack, and looked at him quizzically.

“Why?”

“It might get contaminated and it will be destroyed”.

“Ah. What about my shoes?”

There was no answer.

Photos taken, we continued into Chernobyl, the ghost town synonymous with, and ravaged by, the radioactive fallout following the meltdown of reactor 4 on 26th April 1986. Except Dennis must have taken a wrong turn. In the decades-old apartment blocks, lights were on; people were walking the tree-lined streets; there was a row of cars next to a park. There were hotels and cafes that even had coffee machines that whirred, grinding beans to powder. Wasn’t this supposed to be a deserted town, a place where you cannot even rest your bag? A place upon which Dennis’ hopes of forming a ballet troupe rested, as he orchestrated our tiptoed wanderings? Instead I saw a small town quietly going about its business.

My confusion continued as the ill-fated power station came into view. There were tall and erect trees and expanses of grass; nature seemed to be flourishing. The power plant was intact, though over the western end there appeared to be an aircraft hangar. This, Dennis explained, was the sarcophagus that contained the radiation still emanating from reactor 4.  It was completed in 2016, costing a cool 1.5 billion euros, and was the largest moveable object in the world. “Two thousand five hundred people work on decommissioning the power plant” Dennis told us, “it is going to take until 2080”. Again, I was surprised how normal everything felt: a few cars driving around, people working in the plant, a yellow and black aesthetic distinctly lacking, in contrast to the gift shop. We took photos at a commemorative monument, framed by three pine trees, within 200 metres of reactor 4. Perhaps naively, I had thought there was no way I could be so close safely to the site that had spawned so much devastation.

A huge amount of work had gone into cleaning up the surrounding area – all the topsoil had been stripped away and buried, as had all living things and piles of radioactive material. This had made a huge difference to the recovery and safety of this area and meant that trees could grow, people could work and even live here. It was only later I would understand what those clean-up efforts really meant.

Before we left Dennis took us to the town of Pripyat. This was a ghost town. It had been founded as a model Soviet settlement in 1970, population 50,000, and was the first Soviet town to have the extravagance of – wait for it – a supermarket. This we visited, a mass of twisted and rusted brown shelving and fridges on the floor. Hanging from the ceiling were blue signs still proudly displaying “Fruit”, “Vegetables”, “Fish”, “Meat” and “Sweets”. They were the only bits that looked relatively untouched. We walked further on to the infamous fairground – ferris wheel, merry-go-round and dodgems – now dilapidated and rusting. It looked like these had been abandoned after decades of hard use, but I was wrong again. Dennis explained to us: “None of these things were ever used. The park was set to open on May Day”. Just five days before the park was about to be filled with laughing and screaming children and parents, the reactor went into meltdown. The dodgems lay around like unfulfilled dreams.

We left Pripyat through another army checkpoint. There seemed to be so many contradictions in this area – the copious covering of trees, the working town, the regulations. I probed Dennis a little more:

“Why is the army protecting this town?”

“They want to protect it from scavangers”

“Didn’t you just tell us it was all junk?”

I was trying to be funny, though as the words left my mouth they immediately felt crude.

We exited Chernobyl through a body scanner similar to those at airport security, but it sniffed out not metal but radiation. Before we headed back to Kiev there was just time to visit the tourist tat shop again. Apparently not satisfied with their previous purchases – or so inspired by our visit – another twenty minutes passed as my Ukrainian companions augmented their voluminous collection of selfies with other more tangible goods to take home (still no condoms).

Back in Kiev, I found myself exhausted from the day and could not even muster the energy for a revitalising run. When at 10pm, as I lay slumped on the sofa, my phone rang and I saw Igor’s name shine from the screen, I decided this was not the late night chat I wanted. Somewhat guiltily, I left my phone vibrating until it lay still. A couple of minutes passed before my phone reanimated itself. I waited, letting it die. Only in the uneasy stillness did I reconsider and call back, Igor’s enthusiasm greeting my ear, jolting some energy into my lethargia.

He asked about Chernobyl and I told him it had appeared much more normal than I had expected. There was a pause.

“You remember Sergei?” Of course.

“Did he tell you where he worked?” In a glass factory, right?.

“Yes, but that wasn’t it. He worked on one of the rescue teams. Not on the frontline, but he helped the clear up”.

The rescue teams... where was Igor going with this?

“His eldest daughter, she has two children. They both have disabilities. And this daughter, she was diagnosed recently with cancer”

Igor paused.

My mind was trying to catch up with the implications of what Igor had said. It wasn’t just Polina who had a disability, all of Sergei’s children and grandchildren appeared to have damaged health. The reason for that wheelchair wasn’t some unfortunate genetic fluke.

My visit to Chernobyl began to feel like an illusion. The normalcy there and my focus on that infamous geographical location was in some ways a mask for the real, current, impact of the disaster. I had thought everything had gone back to normal: the carpet of trees, the cars, and a small town quietly ticking over. In fact, the continued consequences of the meltdown were felt elsewhere. Not in Chernobyl, but in small villages in the surrounding area where people had moved to, or provided help from. Consequences felt far from the tourist trail and $80 day trips with a brochure proclaiming “hundreds of exciting pics for instagram”.

And whilst the new sarcophagus was no doubt important, where was the support for the families who were still bearing the consequences of the disaster? Where were the billions of euros to help them navigate financially precarious lives affected by disease, loss, and disability? I realised the legacy of Chernobyl was not understood through visiting the power station or a ghost town.

The legacy of Chernobyl lives on in children like Polina. Children you or I might give a second glance to, perhaps tinged with pity – something that she would hate – and think they have suffered unfortunate fluke chance to be born with a disability. Actually, children we would be unlikely to ever see, even if we visited Ukraine, because they mostly live in backwater settlements few outside the country have heard of. 

This led me to recall the Little Lighthouse centre Igor had shown me in Makariv, a town 60 kilometres outside of Kiev and not far from Polina’s village. In the basement of a unremarkable Baptist church Igor was building something very special: his “child dream”. A place where children with physical and mental disabilities could receive rehabilitation, day care and love rolled into one. “I want this to be nicer than my own home” Igor told me, “a place they are excited to visit” – in contrast to state-run institutions which have a grim reputation. Igor told me that families in this area were very poor, unable to give their child the support they needed: homes adapted to their needs, massages that soothe tense muscles, and even the time to take their child to the centre amidst a struggle to make ends meet. At the Little Lighthouse, they were able to receive the treatment, understanding and care that they were unlikely to get at home. What I didn’t realise when I visited, even after I met Polina, was how acute the need was for such facilities here – this area has an unusually high number of disabled children.

Igor and the Little Lighthouse project are not funded by the EU, or even the Ukrainian government. They receive relatively little support, but what I found heartening was how that appeared to be no barrier for Igor. Despite the difficulties he and his team were up against – bureaucracy, funding and delays from Covid – they were making a difference to the lives of many families in a forgotten community, who were unlikely to receive support from anywhere else. They are gradually building a new legacy in the shadow of Chernobyl. A place where beamingly energetic girls and boys like Polina could rest, play and draw landscapes.

The Little Lighthouse is supported by ChildAid Eastern Europe, a charity supported by Bristol2Beijing. To support Bristol2Beijing’s partner charities, including ChildAid Eastern Europe, click here.

For more information on the Little Lighthouse project click here.

For more information on ChildAid Eastern Europe click here