I was 6 when it happened. By a strange twist of fate, I was visiting my grandmother, who lived a few hundred kilometers closer to Chernobyl than my home town of Grodno. I think the Soviet authorities must have covered up what happened pretty nicely - by the time we received an alarmed phone call from our relatives one could already pick strawberries. And that was exactly what I was indending on doing, a six year old, stretching his arm out to a patch of juicy ripe strawberries on a nice summery day, when my dad told me I couldn't eat them. It was more so the faces of the adults that led my child mind to understand the severity of the situation than the forbidding words. Everyone had their brows a little closer. Everyone held that expression for much longer than I remembered them doing it before. The adults told me we couldn't pick any vegetables or mushrooms or berries. It was the strangest thing - an object of my earnest desire, that used to signify the beginning of summer, now became a forbidden fruit.
When I returned to Grodno, my mom crisscrossed my hands with iodine to give my body a boost against radiation. Her brows were also a little closer together than usual. It was really hard to find out anything reliable about the accident. We never trusted the government to begin with, but dismissing their newsstories would leave us with almost nothing - it was, after all 1986, an Iron Curtain was still rather firmly in place, preventing western media from reaching our eyes and ears. Our best sources of information, believe it or not, were --- rumors.
I recently found out that Belarus took in about 70% of the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, making us by far the worst country affected by this accident. Grodno, luckily, was spared the worst of it, with the winds carrying the radioactive debris slightly more to the northeast. Still, as a child I would fantasize - climbing up on top a nearby sun-burned hill, I would invision its twisted, clinging to life plants as radiation mutants, opening myself up to them as my peers and friends in our cut-throat world. Was I really that far off? I don't know.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of the explosion. A lot of bitterness and pain still remain in the affected regions. Let this be an inspiration to simply love one another. We humans can be so cruel in our infights. Breathe peace.