By Danielle Gauthier
Imagine the life of a child in a country where even playground swings swaying in the breeze represent contamination.
It’s the horror faced daily by Belarussian children living under the shroud of Chernobyl, the site of the worst peacetime nuclear disaster in history.
For Ottawa poet Terry Ann Carter, it’s also a stark image in her recently published collection of poetry:
Everything familiar
becomes dangerous
paint on walls
playground swings
and mushrooms
golden and slim
betrayed by passing winds.
Many poems in the Chernobyl-inspired Waiting for Julia, Carter’s first published book of poetry, recall those silent winds in the Ukraine on April 26, 1986.
But most of all, they recall the children who still breathe the radiation.
After the explosion at the nuclear plant, winds spread radioactive iodine fallout over 80 per cent of Belarus, located just 10 kilometres to the north. About two million people — one-fifth of the population — were exposed to radiation.
Over 800,000 of them were children.
One became Carter’s muse and her inspiration to support an Ottawa-based charity.
Julia Vedishova, an eight-year-old orphan, first came to Ottawa in 1995 for a summer respite program run by the Canadian Relief Fund for Chernobyl Victims in Belarus.
“Whatever Belarussians grow, whatever they eat, the air they breathe — it’s all contaminated,” says Dori Jensen, group leader for the charity’s orphan project in Ottawa.
Since Chernobyl, cases of thyroid cancer, which are extremely rare among children, have increased 100-fold in Belorussian children.
“The reason to get involved is to get these children away from that,” says Jensen. “The reason people stay involved is the love.”
Johanna and John Burrows of Nepean raised the $1,100 for Julia’s airfare, with help from Carter and others. When Julia arrived, they held a community barbecue.
“My first impression was meeting her at the park — just this little girl, with this little shy smile,” recalls Carter. “But for me, the smile was this invitation to be part of something.”
That “something” was a reading of poems inspired by Julia, set to music by conductor and teacher John McGovern, at the SAW Gallery in 1996.
But for Carter, it wasn’t enough.
She decided to expand the poems. The mother of two says she often cried as she researched Chernobyl and tried to find metaphors for grim realities.
“There were times when the subject became so dark. I had pictures of these children dying in orphanages.”
Carter says the sounds of the words affected her too, almost as much as the idea of widespread radioactive poisons.
“They rhyme: cesium, plutonium, strontium,” she says. “But they’re deadly.”
To deepen the tragedy of her Chernobyl poems, Carter composed personal ones about her family’s comfortable Canadian lifestyle. A final long poem, “Waiting for Julia,” brings Canada and Belarus together in a hopeful prayer.
The book was published by Third Eye Publications in January 1999, along with drawings by Lucya Yuzyk and a formal score by McGovern.
“I’d like people to perceive the emotion,” says McGovern of his “Chernobyl Suite,” which has Eastern European undertones. “There’s the contentment of Canadian society and then the whole dissonant nature of Chernobyl.”
Carter and her colleagues are donating all royalties from book sales to the orphan project.
The Canadian Relief Fund has one orphan group in Ottawa for 1999. Twenty children from orphanages and 160 children from Belarussian homes will stay with local families.
Julia is invited to Ottawa for her fifth summer.
“We all ‘wait for Julia’ — it’s metaphoric — and we hope for positive things for her,” says Carter.