Few can forget the images broadcast after the April 26, 1986, explosion at the Lenin Atomic Power Station at Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
For some, Chernobyl's impact has lingered more tragically.
As nature would have it, heavy winds facilitated the deposit of radioactive materials as far away as Gomel, a town 70 miles northeast in Belarus, where a Cornell graduate student and a Cornell faculty member have since been involved in an educational healing effort.
Today, the 18-mile radius around Chernobyl is an "exclusion zone" -- too polluted for human residency. The radiation released by the explosion has been described as being nearly 200 times the combined amount released by the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All across eastern Europe, in fact, the impact of the world's worst nuclear industrial disaster were immediately felt.
Peter Clark, now a doctoral student in Cornell's Department of Education, was one of many members of the world community who responded to the tragedy when its impact became apparent. In October 1991, Clark went to Belarus to distribute medical supplies under the auspices of World Relief, an international non-governmental organization.
But governments and humanitarian organizations soon realized that beside the more obvious health fallout -- such as increased thyroid cancer rates in children -- something more subtle had happened. Studies performed by medical experts, radiation specialists, social scientists and government officials in Belarus revealed that the 10.2 million people there were suffering from psychological trauma -- fear, depression and passivity had permeated the social landscape.
In January 1992, Clark was recruited to Cornell by D. Merrill Ewert, assistant professor of agriculture, extension and adult education. The two had met in 1990 as trainers of development workers in El Salvador. Ewert's areas of specialization include community development, so their teaming together was a natural match. Ewert's connection to their latest project also is personal, as his grandparents came from the Ukraine.
Clark and Ewert's first joint trip to Belarus was in February 1994 to assist in the design of a survey instrument, under the direction of renowned Soviet sociologist Anatoly Kasyanenko of Gomel State University. The study found, among other things, that trust was a "necessary condition for community development, a flourishing civil society and functional democracy," but as a result of a 1929 Stalin-era law, repealed only in 1994, "community organizations were either eliminated or made entirely subservient to the party-state." Thus, the psychological healing of the country, which could have been aided by the active involvement of the citizenry after the tragedy, was being impaired by a lack of experience with community development, Ewert said.
Clark agrees: "There is a high percentage of highly educated people," he said. "But there is a feeling you can't overcome anything. . . . that the government should do everything."
Ewert and Clark got to work and designed a three-year training series called "Principles of Community Development." Each year there are three workshops in the city of Gomel targeted to civic leaders and professionals interested in community development.
After five return trips to Gomel, Ewert and Clark say they are seeing some
success stories emerge: an engineer is working
with
spinal trauma victims; a group of volunteers are providing services, dropped by the
government, to disabled children of local factory workers; and a carpentry shop is
addressing the needs of youth prone to alcohol and drug abuse. About a dozen
community development projects have been funded
so far, they said.
Both educators say Belarusians have been overwhelmingly positive about their community development training experience. Ewert said he hopes the idea of such training can be expanded to other Eastern European nations. And Clark feels that a test of success will be when the two of them are no longer needed as educators, but as advisors. They have another trip scheduled for this summer.