The long shadow of Chernobyl

Ruslana Wrzesnewskyj doesn’t care about warring statistics; she knows what she has seen. When she adopted her daughter from Ukraine in 1993, the orphanages were crowded with children who had been born with deformities or left by parents who had suddenly died young. The Toronto realtor was so shaken by what she saw that she founded Help us Help the Children, a project of the Children of Chornobyl Canadian Fund that has assisted thousands of orphan victims with summer camps, medicines and scholarships.
‘Called the silent killer’ “All you have to do is travel through Ukraine,” she says. “It’s called the silent killer. It’s a horrible thing to come into a town and see that half of the people in their 40s are dead.”