Helping the self-settlers of the Chornobyl Zone.

Our first meeting came as a real surprise. Radiation safety rules forbid growing anything in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, and visitors may not even wear open clothing. And suddenly, among abandoned villages, there was an ordinary house, a vegetable garden and an elderly woman in a headscarf. Lively, friendly and nothing like a resident of the "deadly zone" most people imagine.

This was Hanna from Paryshiv. That is how we met the self-settlers (samosely) - people who returned to their homes after the evacuation and stayed to live in the Zone. Some came back right after the accident, others a few years later. They returned to the land where they had spent their whole lives and where their parents and grandparents are buried. Most of them are elderly, and in each village there are only a handful.

We could no longer drive past. We wanted to understand how they lived and what they ate from their radioactive gardens. They turned out to be simple, sincere people, each with a difficult story of their own. And as soon as we started dropping in and asking questions, it became clear how much they needed.

At first it was a purely personal matter: we came, brought food or building materials, sat down and talked. No photos, no reports. Over time the self-settlers saw that our visits were not accidental and began to ask for things themselves: a mobile phone, a TV, a refrigerator.

In the summer of 2012 we first asked visitors to the CHORNOBYL TOUR forum to help. From then on, big items were bought together, and every trip ended with a photo report. We also built help for the self-settlers into our tours: guests dug gardens, carried water and chopped firewood. Refrigerators and TVs traveled into the Zone in the luggage holds of tour buses. The Polish news agency PAP later wrote about it.

One of those tourists was Oleksii. He chopped a winter's worth of firewood for two self-settlers. In 2014 Oleksii went to war in the Donetsk region as a volunteer and was killed. We remember him.

Paryshiv, Illintsi, Kupuvate, Opachychi, Novoshepelychi, Zalissia, Chornobyl. We always brought the same things: food, something they needed and time to talk. Below are a few stories from those trips.