Farewell, Ukraine!

One of my last activities in Kyiv was watching the local Premier League team, Dynamo, play Karpaty (from Lviv). I'm not usually keen to watching soccer, but this game was incredible. The final score was 7-3, with Dynamo clinching its first victory of the season.

I am writing this post from JFK after a long but uneventful flight from Kyiv. It's wonderful to revel in the American-ness of this airport after being abroad for so long. Look, there's a Starbucks! Someone reading US Weekly! Little kids dressed in colorful plastic Crocs! Fat people!

It's lovely.

Since my connection to Norfolk, VA, has been delayed for over an hour (that's JFK for you, I guess), I think now is a good time to update this blog about my last few days of research.

On Monday, after interviewing some liquidators, I walked over to the dosimetry department to undergo a full body radiation scan. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. I had to lay prone in a small, metal-lined room for half an hour. There was a web cam installed inside, which is how I got this picture:

Fortunately, I came out as clean as a whistle. My Cesium-137 level was only 30 (I think the units are Beckrels? It's hard to tell because my form is in Russian). The average healthy Kyiv resident carries a load of about 400. The dosimetrist actually expected to see a much higher reading considering that I had been eating a lot of local produce, but I guess five weeks just isn't enough time to acquire any sort of irradiated dose.

On Tuesday, I arrived at RCRM at 10 AM, hoping to interview a potential Ark worker who was in the hospital for check-in control. I ended up getting more than I bargained for; in addition to an interview, I got to watch the man go through the entire process of becoming an ICARR participant. It went something like this:

Step 1: The worker is offered the ICARR consent form.

Step 2: The worker reads and signs the ICARR consent form. He is given a copy for his records.

Step 3: An official at RCRM prints out a full page of identical bar code labels from her computer. These bar codes are the participant’s unique ID number, and they allow ICARR scientists to identify him anonymously. One of the bar code labels is stuck to the signed consent form.

Step 4: The worker is brought to another room, and scientists take from him what looks like a lot of blood. It ends up being only 40 ml, separated into 4 or 5 test tubes, each of which is labeled with a bar code.

Step 5: The worker is paid his "incentive" of 100 Hryvnas (= 20 USD). He is given a receipt for the exchange, which is stored in a binder along with his consent form.

Step 6: An official at RCRM sits down at a computer and logs on to ICARR’s online information exchange system. She enters the participant’s bar code into the system, along with a few other descriptive data points (male or female, etc). From now on, the worker is officially in the ICARR system, and scientists from the US or Ukraine can use the online data exchange program to enter or retrieve his health data. There are drop-down menus where various medical reports (cardiology, gastroenterology, etc) can be made about him in the future.

Step 7: An official at RCRM takes the participant’s blood samples to a laboratory in the immunology department. There, DNA, plasma, etc. will be extracted.

Step 8: Eventually, the biological materials will be divided into two, with one copy staying in Ukraine and the other being shipped to the US for research.

After witnessing the ICARR procedures, I interviewed four more liquidators and called it a day.

It was bittersweet saying goodbye to my Ukrainian friends and colleagues at RCRM and RTI. This trip has been such an incredible experience, and I will miss Kyiv a lot. But, I’m sure we will all keep in touch, and I am ready to go home and start school again. It’s been a long summer!

I'll leave you with a photo from the Kyiv zoo:

Catching up on last week: My trip to Crimea

On August 12, I decided to take a short break from Chernobyl research to experience a new part of Ukraine. (I had interviewed just about every liquidator in the hospital at that point, so I had no pangs of guilt about leaving for a few days.) So, Reid and I hopped aboard a Yak-42 airliner (one member of Donbassaero's impressive fleet of Antonovs and Yakolevs...) headed towards the Black Sea.

Crimea is an interesting place. It is far more "Russified" than Kyiv, which is understandable given the fact that a much higher percentage of its population is ethnically and culturally Russian. Everyone speaks Russian, all of the signs are in Russian, and there are still many Russian flags flying above Crimean cities. I honestly felt like I had left Ukraine for its neighbor to the east, without having to pay $100 for the visa.

In fact, it was a surprise to many when Crimea became a part of independent Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The event led to tensions between Russian and Ukraine, and since the entire Soviet Black Sea Fleet was still stationed on the peninsula, there were worries of armed skirmishes. Crimea went through a period of self-government in 1992, but eventually agreed to remain a part of Ukraine, provided the Kyiv government expand its already extensive autonomous status. Today, Crimea has the special status of "Autonomous Republic," operating as a parliamentary republic with no president.

Reid and I went to two different cities in Crimea: Yalta and Sevastopol. Yalta was a wonderful, bustling place chock full of Soviet kitsch.



The views were gorgeous. It's no wonder the tsars liked to take their vacations here. There aren't very many places on earth where you can be at the mountains and the sea at the same time.

At first glance, Sevastopol was less beautiful than Yalta. Set away from the Crimean mountains, it is a military town, home to both the Ukrainian and Russian Black Sea Fleets. However, once we started exploring, we found some amazing sights. The ruins of the ancient Greek city of Chersonesus were stunning:


And the nearby village of Balaklava offered some great views:


It also offered a once-top-secret Soviet submarine factory, which we were free to explore at a cost of 10 Hryvnas (=2 USD):


I wonder how many American spies would have given their lives to see this thing forty years ago?

Crimea was the most beautiful place I've ever seen, hands down. I'm so glad I went. It was a real adventure for me to travel through a vacation destination not for English-speakers, but for Russians. Dasvidaniya!

My second excursion to Chernobyl, told through photos

I've decided to present the second Chernobyl trip a little differently than the first. There were simply too many fabulous photos to choose from, so instead of going through the trouble of uploading them all to Blogger (a slow and arduous process that I was not looking forward to), I've prepared a photo album of sorts with captions explaining each of the images.

To view it, just follow this link:

Чорнобиль (Chornobyl), Trip #2

And click on the first photo. To flip through the album, just click on the photo that is currently on your screen, or click "next" in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen.

I couldn't fit all of the photos in one album, so I had to create a second one on the same site. It's available at this link:

Чорнобиль (Chornobyl), Trip #2 (Continued)

The links to these albums (and others) are also available under the "My Photos" section on the tool bar to the right.
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In case you're curious, the boy with me is my boyfriend Reid (also a senior at Duke) who was wonderful enough to come visit me in Ukraine for 10 days (and crazy enough to want to go to Chernobyl, too).

The world's most bizarre day trip: Chernobyl

I apologize for the blogging hiatus, but the past two weeks have been an absolute whirlwind. Since my last post I’ve taken two separate Chernobyl excursions, flown in a creaky, Soviet-era Yak-42 airliner, swam in the Black Sea, and explored a secret Soviet submarine factory. I’ve seen so much and done so much that I’ll never be able to sum up my array of experiences in a lifetime of blog entries... Still, I will try my best to give you an idea of what I did during this ultra-packed stretch of my Ukraine trip through words and lots of pictures.

Let’s start from the beginning. On August 8, I went on my first excursion to Chernobyl. RCRM booked the trip, so my companions were all scientists and doctors from the hospital. The excursion was arranged by the Chernobyl NPP, and our guide was a plant employee who spoke Russian.

My second trip came three days later, on August 11. This excursion was arranged by a great local travel agency called Solo East. It was less official than my other tour, and more geared towards English-speaking tourists. This tour was better in many ways because the guide took more risks to show us places to take photos. However, I had to pay about $145 for the Solo East tour, whereas the official tour was free. I will dedicate this first post to my official tour, and the next post to my Solo East tour.

The weather was appropriately dreary the morning of August 8. From the hospital, we packed into a van and drove north for about 2 hours until we reached the first checkpoint.


This gate marks the entrance to the 30-km Exclusion Zone. A stone-faced guard examined all of our passports before granting us entry. From there, we drove for another 30 minutes until we arrived in the village of Chernobyl (not to be confused with the Chernobyl NPP, which is about 10 km away), where we stopped briefly for snacks. Chernobyl is a functioning town, but most of its inhabitants are NPP workers who only live there temporarily during working shifts. It’s technically supposed to be an evacuated village, but there are about 100 “self settlers” who returned after the accident against the wishes of the government.

From Chernobyl village, we made our way down the road to the Chernobyl NPP.


We drove around a bit to snap photos of the damaged reactor, above. Then, we pulled into the plant’s administrative offices (which were located in the same row of buildings as the damaged reactor… yikes) for a lecture.


In the model above, you can see the four reactors that were once operational at the Chernobyl NPP; all of them are contained in that long building in the center, with the damaged reactor #4 on the far right (encased in the black shelter).

After the lecture, and to my complete surprise, we drove right up to the damaged reactor.


There was a small museum there, which contained a very neat and painstakingly detailed model of the damaged reactor.


As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, the original reactor sarcophagus was only meant to last 20 years, so it has many structural problems today, 21 years after the accident. Our guide described some of the work that has already been done to stabilize the reactor. On the bottom half of the poster below, you can see two diagrams of the shelter wall: a “before” and an “after” shot.


As you can see from the drawing on the left, the shelter’s scaffolding was not supporting this particular wall very well, so the weak wall had to bear most of the weight of the roof. This situation was very dangerous since one heavy rainstorm could potentially increase the weight of the roof enough to crumble the wall. In the diagram to the right, you can see the changes they made to translate the weight off of the wall and onto the scaffolding. Fixes like this one are only temporary, however, which is why the Ark is being constructed.


Above is a wall poster from the museum about the SIP project, a.k.a. Ark building project.

We next made our way to the abandoned city of Pripyat, located 2 km from the plant. This was my favorite part of the trip. Pripyat had been a bustling young town of about 50,000 people (mostly NPP workers and their families) when the Chernobyl disaster occurred. After the accident, it was completely abandoned. During evacuations, people were told to bring with them only their money and important papers as they would be returning in 3 days. Thus, everything was left in Pripyat as it had been in 1986; only Mother Nature and a few looters have disturbed the town since then. It was a haunting site.


One of the women in our group was a Pripyat evacuee in 1986. We explored her old apartment together:

We also went into the city’s cultural center. It was disturbing to see the amount of destruction 20 years can do.


When I was in Pripyat, I couldn't help imagining myself in a sci-fi scenario. I felt as if I had been thawed after being frozen for thousands of years, only to find that humans had mysteriously disappeared during this time, leaving just the ruins of human civilization in tact. I wonder how many more decades it will take until Pripyat is completely unrecognizable - 100 years? 500 years? It was a bizarre, unforgettable experience to be in Pripyat.

Before leaving the Exclusion Zone, we all endured a frightening few moments as we stepped into a body dosimeter. Fortunately, all of us registered "clear."


Stay tuned - I have a whole other version of this story to tell in my next post.

More sightseeing in Kyiv

Well, I had another interesting weekend of sightseeing in Kyiv! My first stop was the Chernobyl Museum, located in the quaint mercantile quarter of Podil:

The museum did a great job of presenting its collection of historical artifacts (ID cards, newspaper articles, even a gilded church alter that was salvaged from an evacuated village) in a symbolic and very dramatic way. For example, in the exhibit below, you can see an apple tree (the museum’s symbol for the Chernobyl disaster) growing through a cradle. Surrounding the cradle on the floor are photographs of Chernobyl evacuees. Very moving.

Above is a picture of my English-language tour guide pointing out the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone. I was surprised to learn that such a small museum offered an English-language tour, until I realized that the majority of it patrons seemed to be American tourists. My theory is that this is because the museum is prominently featured in Lonely Planet’s guidebook on Ukraine, which is pretty much the only English-language travel guide available about the country. Turns out, most Ukrainians haven’t even heard about the Chernobyl museum (including the doctors at RCRM, who treat Chernobyl victims on a daily basis…).

Above, another dramatic exhibit.

After visiting the museum, my Ukrainian friend insisted I try some real Ukrainian fast food:

The name of the restaurant, “Smacha Kartoplia,” means “Tasty Potato” in English. To order, you pick two salads from a display, which are then plopped into the middle of a twice-baked cheesy potato. We got crab salad and mushroom salad in ours. (Note: In Ukraine, the word “salad” by no means denotes a healthy bed of mixed greens – as you can see, it’s always some combination of meat, pickles, and mayonnaise.)

After gorging on tasty potatoes, we worked it all off by climbing Andriyivsky uzviz, or Andrew’s descent, to St. Andrew’s Church:

The bronze people I am clutching above are characters from an old film called Za Dvoma Zaytsamty. The title means “chasing two hares” and comes from an ancient Ukrainian proverb. In the movie, a poor Ukrainian barber in late-19th-century Kyiv puts on airs to woo two wealthy women but is exposed for his duplicity.

Above, statue of Cossack hero Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

Since it was Saturday, the brides were out in droves again. Here is a young couple posing for a photo in front of some statues of great Slavs. I think they represented Princess Olha, St. Cyril and St. Methodius (the founders of the Slavic alphabet), and Apostle Andriy.

We took the “funicular,” or cable car, down the steep hillside back to Podil.

I love this city! Next post – as promised – my take on the situation of the liquidators.

Welcome to Kyiv!

Requisite Lenin statue on Blvd. Taras Shevchenko

I arrived in Kyiv at 9 AM on Thursday morning. There is a 7-hour time difference between Ukraine and Virginia, so needless to say I was a little jet lagged. The first thing I noticed about Kyiv was its smell; there is a sort of constant musk here that is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. The second thing I noticed was the heat: it reached almost 100 degrees on Thursday.

RTI International arranged to have a driver pick me up at Borispol Airport, and together we drove to RTI’s offices, which are on Kyiv’s main street, Khreshchatyk, in an old, soviet-style apartment building.

There is a dearth of real office buildings in Kyiv, so it’s not unusual for businesses to use an apartment for their office space. RTI’s office/apartment is very modern, and about 30 people work there. On Friday, I even had the opportunity to attend an “office birthday party” there, which was much cooler than it sounds. The boss – a nice Slovak man who, hilariously, looks just like Ricky Gervais – hired a band and brought an enormous spread of food. In true Ukrainian manner, every five minutes or so someone from the office would make a speech about the birthday girl, singing her praises and raising a toast.

The folks at RTI brought me to my apartment at around 12:30 PM on Thursday. It’s a lovely place smack dab in the middle of Khreshchatyk Street. Nearby me are a market, an underground mall, more up-scale shopping, and many of the major government buildings (including the President’s Office and the Rada).

My building on Khreshchatyk

The view from my window.

I’m am so, so thankful that I took that Ukrainian class this summer, because there is absolutely no way I could have survived on my own in this city without it. As expected, many people speak Russian here, but everyone understands Ukrainian, and all of the signage is in Ukrainian. I’ve already used the language a lot, although not in very sophisticated ways. (E.g., at the market, pointing to a peach, shouting “Ya ho-choo!”, and stuffing 4 Hyrvna in the vender’s fist.)

Although RTI International, an American organization, made all of the arrangements for me to come to Kyiv, my research mentor is actually affiliated with the Ukrainian Research Center for Radiation Medicine, or RCRM. The Center is too far away to walk from Khreshchatyk, so I had to (gasp!) ride the metro on Friday morning. That was certainly an experience... the Kyiv metro does not have an intuitive design, and to make matters worse, all of the signage is in Cyrillic. It's truly a miracle that I made it through, and I have never been more proud of myself.

RCRM is a village of buildings that house offices, clinics, and laboratories:

EDIT: Despite the Soviet style, it was created in 1999 especially for dealing with the victims of the Chernobyl disaster. My mentor, Dr. Loganovsky, works in the main clinic. Each floor in his building is dedicated to treating different ailments associated with radiation exposure; there is a cardiology department, a pulminology department, etc. His is the psychoneurology department. There, they mainly treat organic mental disorders.

After sipping coffee together and discussing my project, Dr. Loganovsky asked another doctor on the ward, Maria, to take me on a tour of RCRM. She will serve as my mentor after Dr. Loganovsky goes on vacation in early August.

We soon made our way to the radiation dosimetry building. A very nice man showed me two pieces of equipment for detecting radiation in people. The first was a simple chair that is sat in by a patient for about 3 minutes. The man actually scanned me in it, but my levels were so low that the machine could not produce a reading.

The second apparatus is a more accurate “fully body counter” that takes about 20 minutes to produce a reading. To use it, a person crawls into a bed located in a small room lined with thick lead sheets. (According to the man, this lead was salvaged from old, WWII-era Soviet ships.) Under the bed are six scanners, and above the bed are two circular scanners that swing into place over the patient’s lungs. There is also a forehead scanner for detecting radionucleotides in the skull bone.

The man in the dosimetry department was very interested in scanning me with the full body counter. He rarely sees such “clean” subjects, he said. Even in Kyiv, there is a certain level of background radiation that is detectable in people who have lived there for a while. I honestly think he just saw me as an opportunity to calibrate his machinery. Nevertheless, I would have done the full body scan, but Maria was in a rush to leave. So, I told him, “another time.” (It will be interesting to scan myself again right before I leave, just to see if I managed to pick anything up!)

Before leaving RCRM, I asked Dr. Loganovsky if he or his colleagues went to Chernobyl often. I meant for this question to segue into an offer to go there, and he understood immediately.

“What, you want to go there? Young researchers always want to go there. Maria won’t go, but I go often. And we can try to get you there.”

Getting the clearance to go to Chernobyl is very difficult, he warned me. One must go through the government, and it often takes weeks. But he reassured me that it is perfectly safe. Fingers crossed!

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The last thing they showed me at RCRM was a giant freezer full of samples, waiting to be shipped to Duke for analysis. Despite the fact that the freezer is set at -80 degrees, a small part of me wanted to crawl inside and let myself be sent back to Durham, where the language, customs, and people are more familiar.

But the rest of me was deliriously happy and content to be an ex-pat in Ukraine. Kyiv is a beautiful city, throbbing with culture and history. Although everything is foreign, including the smells, I am starting to really like it here.

Last post from America

I got home from Pittsburgh at 2 AM this morning, which gives me only today and tomorrow to prepare for my flight on Wednesday.

Given that instead of packing, I spent most of today in a Volkswagen dealership, magically turning this -

- into this -

- I have even less time to pack than I anticipated. So, this post will be short and sweet.

I'm nervous about leaving for Ukraine. I know that the trip will be a life-changing experience, but I also have incredibly high expectations for myself that may prove difficult to live up to. I am so lucky to have found such an interesting thesis topic and to have been given an opportunity to pursue it in this way. If I don't do this project the justice it deserves, I know I will be frustrated with myself...

Hopefully this nervousness will wear away soon after I arrive in Kyiv. In fact, I'm confident it will, because this is going to be a fun and exciting adventure with no room for fear and nerves!

I'm bringing a good digital camera to Ukraine, so I will be supplementing my posts with lots of nice pictures. (No more of the camera-phone-quality stuff, thank goodness!) I may even try to make a movie or two.

Wish me bon voyage! And, if you have a few minutes, read this article from Discover magazine:

The First Nuclear Refugees Come Home

Chernobyl-area natives return to find a city of ghosts. By Maryann de Leo

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[Just to explain the photos above: my car was totaled a few weeks ago after being struck on the side of the road (where it was parked) by a speeding criminal in a stolen car under police pursuit. I was in bed when the accident happened, and no one was injured. Insurance is giving me a hell of a time, but I should get back most of what I paid for the car. In the meantime, I went ahead and bought basically the exact same car from a dealer here in Virginia. "Safe Happens" is no joke - despite all that exterior damage, the cabin of my Jetta was untouched. After seeing that, I'm definitely a VW girl for life!]