Families seeking the return of children of Chernobyl

John Seagondollar put 11-year-old Vika on a plane back to Belarus in August with the promise that she would return. Next summer, he told her, she would again spend her days swimming, eating pizza and watching cartoons in his North Raleigh home.

"There was no doubt in my mind that she would be coming back," Seagondollar said.

Instead, the program that allows about 1,400 children who live in areas contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to spend their summers in the United States is endangered. Today, Seagondollar will gather with other host families from around the country for a three-day conference in Raleigh, in which they hope to come up with a plan to bring the children back.

The children come from an area in southern Belarus that still suffers the effects of the 1986 nuclear reactor meltdown -- a place where cancers and other illnesses are rampant, and are made worse by poor nutrition and lack of medical care. A few hundred of the youngsters come to the Triangle each summer as part of the Children of Chernobyl program.

The program, started in 1991, is designed to give the children access to U.S. medical and dental care and to give them a six-week respite from the polluted region.

It is in jeopardy because a family in California decided to keep their child in the United States.

The 16-year-old girl, who spent nine summers with her California host family, said she had been abandoned by her alcoholic parents and faced a bleak life with an ill grandmother. She remains in California and is trying to get a student visa.

The Belarus government reacted angrily, immediately shutting down the program.

"They were so selfish," Cheryl Stevens of Raleigh said of the California family. Stevens has hosted a Belarussian boy named Slava for the past eight years,

"How can you look at the other kids and know that you're denying thousands of kids this chance to be healthier, this chance to live a better life?" Stevens said.

Stevens, a teacher at the Franciscan School in North Raleigh, keeps in her classroom a scrapbook of her summers with Slava.

It documents eight years of trips to the beach and the mountains, hiking, swimming and riding roller coasters. Its pages show him laughing and wrestling with the two Stevens children and cuddling with the family dog. He earned money for his struggling family by mowing lawns.

Stevens said Slava arrived each year with letters and gifts from his mother. She said she was awestruck by the trust his parents placed in her, sending their son across the world to the home of a family they had never met. She said violating that trust was unthinkable.

The program's national advocates have hopes of restoring the program before next summer.

Jill Tyson, a board member of the Children of Chernobyl U.S. Alliance, said that, until now, dozens of independent groups have arranged for the children's trips. Each group -- some run by churches, some with paid staff and others run by volunteers -- had its own unique agreement with the government of Belarus. The Alliance provided only support and expertise.

Now, Tyson says, they must come up with a uniform set of rules that includes firm consequences for not returning a child.

Host families, lawyers and foreign dignitaries will spend the weekend at a Hampton Inn trying to hammer out guidelines that might please the Belarus government.

The government has said it might agree to a program that excludes children older than 13, and does not allow children to participate for more than three years.

If those rules hold, Seagondollar will not see Vika again -- even if the program is restored.

He keeps a family portrait on his desk, Vika smiling between the two Seagondollar children.

He said Vika's first summer in Raleigh, when she was 7, began with her refusing to speak and crying herself to sleep. But by the end of the trip, she ran to him every night when he returned from work, relished trips to the pool and demanded ice cream for breakfast.

At home in Belarus, she sleeps in the living room of a crowded apartment where there is almost no room for toys.

"She just gets to be a kid here; she gets to run and play and bike," he said. "We're just praying and hoping that it will all work out."