Home is Where the Heart is. (Blog Post 3)

Observation: I watched a Ted Talk by Holly Morris called “Why Stay in Chernobyl. Because its home.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/holly_morris_why_stay_in_chernobyl_because_it_s_home.html

The disaster at Chernobyl happened after initial problems occurred with the power output in reactor 4 and were not settled in proper manners because of inadequately trained personal. The reactions led to bigger problems and showed flaws in the design of their reactor. The reactor had a fire burning for 11 days blowing the remains of the radioactive material into the atmosphere.  To compare how radioactive it was—it was 400 times more radioactive than the Hiroshima bomb. 28 people who worked on the site as staff or firemen died within 3 months and two died that night of the explosion.  Different organizations around the world estimate from 4,000 to 10,000’s of people who have died because of what happened at Chernobyl.

As a result from the acute exposure to the radiation ung cancer, radiation sickness, leukima, and cardiovascular disease were all common to the “liquidators” and staff of the power plant.  Long term exposure of the low level radiation have shown to result in tumors, genetic mutations, and damage to the immune system.  Much argument has taken place on the direct result of the health of people that live or have lived in Chernobyl .

There has been a high correlation between thyroid cancer in children living in the area back in 1986 and the 90’s because at young ages children are more susceptible to the uptake of iodine in their tyroid gland. Aside from this little research has proved to show any direct relationships from living in the area after the disaster took place. However there has still been many psychological effects taking place post disaster.

The blast zone of this horrific event covered 150,000 kilometers in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. 30 Kilometers of the zone is considered the exclusion zone is is called unihabitied. A total of 200,000 people were evacuated from the result of the Nuclear plants damage and 400,000- 600,000 people were given “liquidator” status as they were apart of the clean up efforts to restore Chernobyl.  

Imagine this being your home.

Would you stay away? Would you come home? What is home?

Molly Harris’ Ted talk highlights some of the experiences and stories she heard of when visiting Chernobyl on its 20^th anniversary. In the exclusion zone, there are currently 200 people living there who are predominantly elderly women. 

These women have a history of surviving the worst. They survived the forced famines of Joseph Stalin in the 1930’s, the Nazi reign in the 1940’s and the disaster that happened in Chernobyl in 1986.

When asked to evacuate for the second time by a solider after a resident returned back to the exclusion zone, the women responded to the solider  “shoot me and dig a grave, otherwise I am going home."

Its impossible to not wonder “what is it that makes these women come back?”  When there is no longer community, people, institutions, and civilization why are the inhabitants of this land coming back?

Some of these residents have been living in the exclusion zone for over 27 years and have lived longer than some of their counterparts who evacuated and lived for 10 years until passing away.

These stories show the risk, deep emotional and mental ties to “home”, and self determination to keep ones home.  Its makes me wonder what makes home, home? The family? The buildings? The food? The memories? The graves of your loved ones?  The work that you built? Success that you gained?  I believe these all are part of what make home, home. Home is an idea that we all create within our own series of circumstances and life development.

The strong phenomena of survival that these women have shown for the sake of their home make me question what makes Dallas or Austin my own home.  It is important for us to understand the idea of home as social workers to understand how our clients view their homes and communities and the strong ties whether, good or bad ,that they may have to those places.  Stories like this, help us understand why we or our clients might feel unexpected deep ties  to the places we live or have grown up in and may not want to leave when positive success and growth call for us to migrate or even eminent danger may come our way. 

http://www.chernobyl-international.org/documents/chernobylfacts2.pdf

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/features/chernobyl-15/cherno-faq.shtml

^Some things I was looking at to help inform me on Chernobyl.