BORYSPIL, Ukraine – Since the accident at the Chornobyl plant in 1986, France has hosted Ukrainian children to help them recover from the nuclear fallout. This year, under the management of the Ukrainian foundation White Elephant, 700 children were sent to live with French families, discovering another culture and finding affection more than 2,000 kilometers away from their homes.
As the arrival doors at Boryspil International Airport open, the children run to meet their parents. Thanks to the White Elephant foundation, they got sent to France for stays that ranged from one to three months, in order to improve their health, but also to discover another culture. The youngest of them is a five-and-a-half-year-old girl, who spent three months in France, away from her family.
Michel Pol, vice-president of the French Simia foundation, which means family in Ukrainian, recalls that after the Chornobyl accident in April 1986, the city of Lilles in northern France welcomed a group of orphans the help treat them for exposure to nuclear radiation.
The trips would resume over the following years, overseen by Sun for the Chernobyl Children, a French foundation. During the 1990’s and at the beginning of the 2000’s, seven buses made the trip each year, crossing all of Europe, to help 350 orphaned children to improve their health in France.
In 2006, the foundation changed its name to Simia, and is now one of the 11 foundations in France that welcomes Ukrainian children, and which work with the White Elephant foundation.
Since its creation in 2003, White Elephant has sent 12,000 children to France.
These stays are important to improve the health of the children because they are still exposed to nuclear radiation, with radioactive elements still accumulating in their body, such as cesium-137. The effects of these elements are still not thoroughly known by scientists. The children also get plenty of nourishment in France, which helps them gain some weight and become more resilient.
“Every child is a story of its own,” Svitlana Prudnikova, president of White Elephant, told the KyivPost. “A really hard story. A really difficult one.”
Many of the children come from orphanages, and have a difficult background, with possibly an alcoholic mother, or a father in jail. “An orphanage is not a family,” she says.
In the French families, the children get their own room, own bed, own toys, and can be properly fed, Prudnikova said. “It’s really important for the children…for their psychology.”
Children often say that they are going for the summer visit to their family, she said, referring to the trips to France. Each year they count the days until they can re-visit, according to Prudnikova.
This affection is shared by everyone. “We consider them as our children,” Caroline Cloet, secretary of the Simia foundation, told the KyivPost.
She recalls moments when Ukrainian teenagers aged 15-16 were crying and jumping into the arms of their French family when returning.
Some families have already legally adopted the children whom they host.
The children meet their new French brothers and sisters, with whom they play and communicate. “There is often a great complicity between kids,” says Cloet.
Even though they may not speak French in the beginning, the children adapt really fast to their new environment, within a few days. They need some rules, however, in order to improve their integration. The vice-president of Simia, Michel Pol, said that the children may not have the French habit of eating three family meals per day at fixed hours, and they have to tell them not to eat between meals, for instance.
“The children of orphanages are used to having a certain amount of discipline,” he says, so the families should then apply a similar discipline.
The children clearly appreciate these moments. In halting French, Sasha, one of the children who just came back from France on Aug. 27, explains all the activities they do: “there was the swimming pool, the sea, the chairlift, the trampoline…”
To bring this joy to the children’s life, the different foundations face many administrative difficulties, as they have to get parental permission, secure visas and airfare. This year for example, a visa was needed for a child three days before departure due to a cancellation by another child who was replaced. In a letter sent on July 31 to the French Embassy, the deputy minister of social policy, Serhiy Ustymenko, thanked the embassy for its contribution, especially for issuing the visas to the children.
As the children say goodbye to their French chaperones, their parents repeatedly thank the organizers.
“Another very beautiful year,” concludes Simia’s secretary Cloet, as the families leave the hall of the airport.
Yves Souben staff writer can be joined at [email protected]
