In the firelight, Vladimir Sopats face reflects the kind of day it has been. The 9-year-old from Yurovichi, Belarus, has been running about on the sandy beach outside a little cabin on Puget Sound.
He has played in the water on a small sailboat, climbed on logs and pranced along catwalks to and from the shore. Now it is evening, and the boy will light a sparkler in the bonfire and watch fireworks because it is the Fourth of July.
While it is indeed a great day for an outing, what makes it even greater for Vladimir and several other young Belarussians in the group is that the sand and grass, the logs, and all the shoreline that they run and play on is not contaminated with radiation.
On July 1, Vladimir and 75 other children from the most radiation-contaminated region on Earth arrived in Washington state to spend the summer living with local families.
All the kids, age 8 to 16, are from Belarus, the country just north of Ukraine, which took about 70 percent of the fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion and remains seriously contaminated to this day. Related medical problems continue to devastate Belarussians, and children born in the years since the disaster are not excluded from risk.
Nurse practitioner Carol Clark at the Everett Clinic and Scooter Perlwitz of Global Family Alliance in Carlsborg, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, went to Belarus in January to test and identify children who would benefit from the medical attention and fresh air they could receive here in the United States.
Clark is no novice in this area. During the famines of the 80s, the Marysville woman worked the refugee camps in Cambodia, Somalia and drought-ridden Ethiopia.
In the cities and villages of Belarus, Clark checked children for signs of disease. At one point she found herself in a snowy field examining a girls head and neck and studying her thyroid for enlargement.
She found another girl named Tanya Cananchuk who was 16, a little old for the program, but, Clark said, Tanyas vision was badly deteriorating. A diagnosis in Belarus indicated Stargardts disease.
I just knew I had to get her back here, Clark said.
When the group returned, they recruited host families who would be good matches for the children. Everett Clinic optometrist Chris Hudspeth volunteered to host Tanya Cananchuk, and spearhead efforts to help her. Families who agreed to be hosts put up $1,200 to $1,400 for each childs travel costs. In some cases scholarships, donations and fund-raisers played a part in making it happen.
Everett Clinic professionals, including 20 doctors and a dozen technicians, nurses and support staff, performed blood tests, complete physicals and, in many cases, advanced tests on more than 70 kids. They contributed more than $35,000 in donated medical services. Thyroid tests were completed on all the children and doctors made three new diagnoses of disease requiring thyroid medication.
Everett Clinic ophthalmologist Dr. Robert Campbell examined Tanya Cananchuk and Providence General Medical Center provided a fluorescein angiogram, a dye study of the back of the eye. Tanya, it turned out, has Best disease, which cannot be cured, but is less devastating in the long run than Stargardts.
Dental needs were huge. Nearly a dozen local dentists provided free services to the children. Most of the hosts found their own family dentists willing to volunteer the work, which was significant. Most of the kids had six or more cavities.
Language barriers existed, but five translators stayed for the summer, helping with serious conversations about health and light conversations about family. A few of the young Belarussians had some English language skills. Communication occurred one way or the other, so bonds were created between the children and their host families.
Tatsiana Puzyna, 11, of Vezhny, Belarus, swam for the first time in her life after her host family, Jim and Lori Jacobson of Marysville and their four daughters, taught her to swim at Moses Lake. That was just one of the summer adventures that bonded Tatsiana with the Jacobson girls and her host mother.
On their final day together, young Belarussians and their hosts filled a large room at Sea-Tac Airport. It was the staging area for a long, hard two days of travel, and also a place to say goodbye.
Many still struggled with a few words of English, or a few words of Russian. When words failed, however, facial expressions took over, and tearful eyes did the talking.
In the middle of the room was Tatsiana Puzyna surrounded by four American sisters who were not quite ready to say goodbye. When an official announced that it was time for the hosts to leave, Tatsiana thanked her host mother, Lori Jacobson, with a difficult sentence in English that was proper and thoughtful.
Then she hugged her mom for the last time, and the full, sweet sentiment of her summer in America shown on her face.
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