The women living in Chernobyl's toxic wasteland

[Jazzy]

Decades after Chernobyl's nuclear disaster, despite the severely contaminated ground, government objections and the deaths of many fellow 'self-settlers’, a community of determined babushkas remains.

Outside Hanna Zavorotnya’s cottage in Chernobyl’s dead zone, a hulking, severed sow’s head bleeds into the snow, its gargantuan snout pointing to the sky in strange, smug defeat.



The frigid December air feels charged with excitement as Hanna, (above) 78, zips between the outlying sheds wielding the seven-inch silver blade that she used to bring the pig to its end.



'Today I command the parade,’ she says, grinning as she passes a vat of steaming entrails to her sister-in-law at the smokehouse, then moves off again. In one hand she holds a fresh, fist-sized hunk of raw pig fat – there is no greater delicacy in Ukraine – and she pauses now and then to dole out thin slices to her neighbours.



'I fly like a falcon!’ says Hanna, shuttling at high speed back towards the carcass. Indeed, falcons – as well as wolves, wild boar, moose and some species not seen in these environs for decades – are thriving in the forests and villages around Chernobyl. One particular falcon, however, has not fared so well. A large grey and white specimen, it is strung up, dead, chest puffed and wings outspread against the slate sky, above Hanna’s chicken coop as a warning to its brethren. 'He came and ate my chicken, so I beat him with a stick,’ she says.



Even though this falcon may not have survived, Hanna and her neighbours have – against all odds and any reasonable medical prediction. Twenty-six years ago, on 26 April 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor No 4 blew up after a routine test, and the resulting fire lasted 10 days, spewing 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.



Hanna was among some 1,200 returnees, called 'self-settlers’, most over the age of 48, who made their way back in the first few years after the accident, in defiance of the authorities’ legitimate concerns. For despite the self-settlers’ deep love of their ancestral homes, it’s a fact that the soil, air and water here in what is now known as the Exclusion Zone, or Zone of Alienation, are among the most heavily contaminated on earth.



Today 230 or so self-settlers remain, scattered about in eerily silent villages that are ghostly but also somehow charming. About 80 per cent of the surviving self-settlers are women in their seventies and eighties, creating a unique world of babushkas, to use a Russian word that means 'grandmother’ but also refers to 'old countrywomen’.



Why would the babushkas choose to live on this deadly land? Are they unaware of the risks, crazy enough to ignore them, or both?

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I found this a very interesting article. Hope you do too!

 

[Evil Eye]

Well can't say I'd like to live there very much... but definitely good for them.

 

[Jazzy]

For a place that's been deemed as one of the most heavily contaminated on Earth, these people are living well into their 70's and 80's. What's up with that?

About 80 per cent of the surviving self-settlers are women in their seventies and eighties

 

[Evil Eye]

Luck, in part, I should think.



They are relatively safe from radiation sickness (they only moved back after some years had passed after all).

That leaves us with an increased chance of cancer (that's where luck comes in) and genetic defects that could be carried on to the next generation (which doesn't seem applicable given their age).

Also (pure speculation), the ones that aren't dead yet might just be naturally less susceptible to cancer and radiation. (On another note: while the radiation in the environment around them might be unnaturally high, it's probably the only radiation they are exposed to normally. Living like they do.)