About Our Mission
Dr. Ludmila Zhirina of Bryansk, Russia, started the non-profit Viola after the region-received fallout from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.
The organization is made up of teachers, doctors and students determined to do whatever they can to educate the population on the dangers of radiation and on methods of cleansing the body of radioactive substances.
She is retired from the University where she was actively researching the effect of radiation on children. The following is from an article, “Living Conditions Effecting Self-Consciousness And Value Orientations In Adolescents Resident In Zone Affected By Chernobyl Npp Accident” she wrote regarding human health and radiation effects.
50 adolescents and 50 persons - their parents resident in town Novozybkov (Bryansk province) were studies during 1993-1994. 50 adolescents - Moscow (Degunino region) residents were the control group at the same time period. Applicated research methods: questionnaire, uncompleted sentences method, individual dialogue, monitoring. In accordance with research Protocol the radiation as phenomenon was never directly mentioned in study. The study results revealed the "life" and "Health of Relatives" as the main values in Novozybkov adolescents. The material well-being and presents possessed the first and second place in control group results. The 5 Levels of adolescents reaction on environmental contamination situation were divided.
The events connected to the Chernobyl NPP Accident affected the psychological peculiarities in town Novozybkov adolescents as their sensitive development period (6-8 years of age) coincided with the years of maximum psychological strain (1986-1988). At present the psychological supportive methods are worked out for adolescents with anxiotic and depressive reaction levels.
Three problems:
In Bryansk Region, 39,000 people were required to evacuate for a period of seven years from the villages with the highest levels contamination. The scenes of desolation they left behind were poignant; empty houses stood with open doors. A child's doll lay on the sill of a broken window. But financial and psychological difficulties showed up at the places where they were resettled.
Housing conditions were poor, and parents rarely found good employment. Children were not well accepted at their new schools;
their classmates called them "glow-worms" and avoided them out of fear that they would radiate on any child who got too close. Such problems led about a fourth of the evacuees to return to their former homes, thinking it better to live where they have a place, even if it is radioactive. Now 9,743 returnees live in the zone of obligatory withdrawal. A typical comment was, "It's better for us to live in the radiation zone with reasonable living conditions." In addition, ethnic Russian refugees from the wars in Kazakhstan and Chechnya come here, since there is space for them, and radioactivity does not kill as quickly as bullets.
The effect of radiation on nervous-psychological conditions was marked in 1986 and afterwards among the people who were exposed to the consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe. Many of them experienced splitting headaches, a sharp reduction of efficiency, and symptoms resembling fits of epilepsy. At first, it was the official doctrine that they were suffering from the effect of one powerful dose of radiation. But then research began to show that chronic radiation is more dangerous than episodic radiation, since high doses accumulate over time. The investigations of Bryansk psychologists and neuropathologists showed that seventy percent of the women who were examined had nervous upsets. Children born after 1986-exhibited retardation of mental development and an increase of the frequency of neuropsychological upset. But the "official scientists" of government agencies explained the increased number of these illnesses by a new term: "radiophobia". But others wondered why, in that case, small children up to six or seven years old, children who don't even understand the meaning of the word "radiation", have the psychical
illnesses.
Observations by doctors in the Bryansk Region showed that the such things as emotional-psychological strains, fears, anxiety, depression, and aggressiveness trouble majority of children. Between the ages of seven and ten, about eighty percent of children are troubled with chronic nervous strain, and twenty percent experience speech difficulties. Illnesses of the nervous system and of the sense organs take the first place in the structure of general morbidity.
Some of the psychological effects of Chernobyl can be seen in the drawings and paintings that children in our program made. Our NGO Viola has big collections of children's pictures and this book is a compilation of artworks and writings as seen through the children’s eyes,