COMMUNITY & CULTURE
THE MELTING POT
Anna Vasilenok
B y T r i s h M u y c o - To b i n
I
n the fall of 2015, Anna Vasilenok stood before hundreds of
people inside a packed church not far from St. Louis Lambert
International Airport, where a crowd had gathered to hear
about public health risks posed by radioactive waste found in
a nearby landfill.
“The radiation is dangerous. You don’t see it, you don’t smell it … ,”
Vasilenok said. “Some people in the church that day didn’t understand
the massive danger. And then someone gave me a microphone - that’s
when my emotions took over.”
Vasilenok, an immigrant from Belarus, had
the audience hanging on to her every word.
“I moved from Chernobyl 20 years ago
to save my daughter,” she began. She started
naming other family members: her in-laws, an
aunt, a cousin, her mother, her father - all of
whom were diagnosed with cancer.
“Do you want that for your children?” she
asked. “You can’t be quiet anymore.”
Vasilenok’s testimony, which was
featured in the HBO documentary, “Atomic
Homefront,” was raw with emotion as
memories of the 1986 catastrophe at a
nuclear power plant in the former Soviet
Union came rushing back. She was 17 when
Chernobyl - considered the worst nuclear
accident in history - struck just 200 miles
from her hometown of Minsk.
“I remember there was an American
doctor on the radio after it happened, and
he said 50 percent of the kids would die of
cancer - and that just stuck with me,” she recalled. “We had the baggage
of Chernobyl with us, we had to do something to protect ourselves
from additional harm.”
That meant being mindful about - among other things - what
she put on the table. “Our daughter, Lubov, was born in 1992. She
was malnourished. We started supplementing with formula, but
the formula was made in Belarus, 50 kilometers from Chernobyl,”
Vasilenok explained. “We had to watch where our food came from.
You find what you can find, but you were always careful.”
Vasilenok and her family came to the United States under the
Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, otherwise known as the “green
card lottery.” At the time, she was torn about leaving Belarus.
“When my daughter was born, we had poverty, an absence of food,
hunger. But when we won the lottery, my husband had already built a
successful business, and we didn’t need to worry about being able to
afford things anymore,” she said.
But a chance conversation with a member of her extended family
gave her the conviction she sought.
“My brother’s mother-in-law was in the
hospital for cancer treatment, and I went
to visit her. She asked how I’ve been, and
I told her we won the green card, but also
that I didn’t know what to do with it.”
Vasilenok said. “She gave me a look and
said, ‘You know, 50 percent of the patients
here are kids. If years later, something
happens to your child ... when you had the
chance to save your child ... how would you
live with that?’”
And so it was that Vasilenok, her husband,
Alexandre, and their 4-year-old daughter
arrived in the U.S. in 1996. Vasilenok, who
was 27 at the time and had a degree in
childhood education and psychology, initially
found work cleaning people’s homes, but she
knew she wanted to teach.
“There was a school not very far from
our apartment. I walked to the school and
applied for a position,” she said. “I think
somebody was watching over me. The principal of the school, who
had just adopted a child from Georgia (the former Soviet republic),
offered me a teaching assistant job. With my master’s degree, I was
ma king $5.25 an hour. We had been in America for about a month.
I was so happy!” She worked at the school during the week; on the
weekends, she cleaned houses.
“Working nonstop seven days a week was hard. But you don’t
question it, you don’t feel sorry for yourself. You do what you do in
order to survive,” she stressed.
“…there’s a place
for the great
American dream,
but the only way
for immigrants to
get out of poverty
is to start from
the very bottom
- and to get an
education.”
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GAZELLE