Pubs and Catastrophes

My cultural events for the weekend were Canadian Pub Night and a visit to the Chernobyl Museum. The order should probably have been reversed.

The school staff is a mix of Ukrainians, English, Irish (Republic and Northern), Australians, Americans, a few other nationalities like German, Dutch, Guatamalan, and French---and a LOT of Canadians.

Canadians have a nice accessible embassy (unlike the US embassy which of course is a fortress, you go through two metal detectors and surrender all potential weapons: water bottles, cell phones, chapstick).

The Canadian Embassy also has Pub Night! So nine Canadian and four American teachers had a jolly time discussing Canada, the U.S., and Ukraine, and fighting about Alice Munro (well, that was just me and a couple of Canadians).

Then on Sat. a friend and I visited the Chernobyl Museum (here in Kyiv, not in Chernobyl, which is 60 miles north of here). I remember eating lunch outside with my colleagues at Holmes Middle School, on a beautiful day in April 1986, when one of them looked up at the sky and asked if we'd heard about the disaster.

The USSR wouldn't admit anything had happened until Swedish scientists noticed rising radiation levels from a giant radioactive cloud blowing north from Chernobyl. The Ukrainian public had no idea until about a week later. People in Ukraine tend to blame any health problem on Chernobyl---no wonder.

The museum was heartbreaking. ID cards of the first responders, before and after photos of the hundreds of towns and villages that were evacuated, photos of weeping elderly displaced "babushkas" (Ukrainian for grandmother, generic term for old woman), walls of photos of children, now dead.

The first responders were firefighters who had no clue what kind of fire they were really fighting. Apparently the higher-ups called them "bio-robots" (see link) .

The official death toll was just raised from 31 to 56. But it's probably in the hundreds of thousands.