peter
“The last few months have been a strange mix of emotions. I work in TV, so I’m used to going lots of places and covering all sorts of stories, but this first time it was personal. In July I travelled to an orphanage with around 300 children in a small town in Belarus. I was there to meet a boy my family once tried to adopt called Banni. Banni was one of the thousands of children affected by the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster, and he first came to Ireland with an Irish charity called the Burren Chernobyl Project. He was six when he arrived at our home, and although the original plan was that he would stay with us for one week, he ended up living with us for over a year. It’s hard to describe how quickly he flourished during this time and how much we grew to love him. So my parents decided to adopt him and were cleared on both sides, but one day my parents got a call from the authorities in Belarus who said they wanted him back. It was heart-breaking. I had always wondered what he would be like now at 21. I wasn’t even sure he’d remember me. I wanted to tell Banni’s story to raise awareness of the huge amount of children still in asylums and orphanages in Belarus today so I decided to make a documentary of my trip to meet him. I’ve never felt so nervous and scared in all my life as I did when I was walking through the door of the orphanage and into the room where he was. I tried to fight back the tears when I saw him and our eyes met but failed. Life can be so cruel for some…”
