Digging in for some work...
I’m writing this blog entry from the passenger seat of a Ford Transit diesel-powered delivery van with a leaky windshield, leaky brake—line (we have to top up the brake fluid every few days when it starts to run low), a leaky front tire (also topped up every 48 hours or so) and a second-hand alternator that was installed two days ago after the first one literally fell off it’s mount. Vladimir, my fixer, is driving south towards Kyiv on the M01 E95 highway, going 120 k/h in an 80 zone; we’ve already bribed our way out of one speeding ticket earlier in the day.
There are no seatbelts.
I love my job.
(Below: Vladimir and a mechanic at a garage in Ivankiv, 120km outside of Kiev, debate the best course of action after the van's alternator decided to stop ... um... alternating.)
I spent almost all of today in Slavutych, the small town built to house all of the Chernobyl workers once the town of Chernobyl became contaminated following the 1986 disaster. Today it’s almost entirely inhabited by current plant workers, people who work other jobs inside The Zone, and the few people who provide support services (shops, restaurants, etc.) to them. Today was probably the most successful 12 hours I’ve spent in Ukraine. We decided to head to Slavutych today after an abysmal day yesterday wandering around the outskirts of The Zone on the west side of the Dnieper river. We had originally planned to spend the whole day inside the exclusion zone, but the cops who were supposed to be “arranging” for our access all got dragged into a big raid on some scrap-metal salvagers that had just been caught. Instead, we ended up driving through villages, shooting abandoned farms and houses, and chatting with a few people along the way. It wasn’t nearly as productive as I’d hoped, but it was good in it’s own way, and allowed me to work through a few things in my head that I really needed to sort out.
Today was different. Vladimir and I both slept in by accident and woke up at 9:30 instead of the planned 7:30, then managed to get stuck in traffic on the way out of Kyiv. We arrived in Slavutych after nearly 2 ½ hours of driving (As I write this, V informs me that we’ve driven 1730 km together since I got here last Saturday.) After a quick lunch in Slavutych we took a brief wander around the town to the memorial for fallen firefighters located in the town square; from there we decided to start wandering and interviewing random people in the hopes of finding someone with a good story to tell.
It didn’t take long to persuade a couple of women sitting on a park bench enjoying the warm, breezy afternoon to start telling us their experiences. One old woman named, Mira, started crying as she remembered what life used to be like in Pripyat. “The best place in the world to live” seems to be the best way paraphrase how most people here remember the old town. Later in the day, when we saw her for a second time, she presented me with a book she was given several years ago: “The Chernobyl Atomic Power Plant at the end of the Millenium” … She inscribed “To the memory of future generations. May this never happen again in any place.” in Russian on the front page for me…
Following our chats with her, we spent a few hours hanging out at the train station in Slavutych grabbing random people as they walked off the train and asking them to tell their stories. Two particularly interesting ones agreed, including an engineer who’s 15 year-old daughter is heading to the US for surgery to repair cataracts in about a month.
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Nic's Current Location:
Yaroslavna Hotel, Vasilkiv, Kyiv, Ukraine
+50° 10' 43.11", +30° 18' 49.24"
