Meet Alexander Filippov
Retired School Teacher, Babichi village, Belarus
Text: Mads Eskesen
Translation: Angela Heath
The story is based on interviews in 2004 and in 2005 by Marianne Barisonek and by Mads Eskesen
”At the moment people only get four hours of lessons in
radioactivity. Who teaches these four hours? It’s usually a general
class teacher, who’s normally not a specialist in the subject. They
can specialise in a million other things: mathematics, biology etc.
There’s a really high degree of ignorance about radioactivity, even
amongst people who have high positions in society. It’s something
that never ceases to surprise me.”
Alexander shows us around the village school where he used to work. The long corridors are painted in bold colours and there are small exhibits and posters made by the pupils. Alexander points out a locked door in a corner, leading to a little room. It used to be the school’s radioactivity laboratory but now that Alexander is retired the room has been locked, the teaching stopped and the equipment removed.
”After Chernobyl I wrote five small books,” Alexander reminisces. ”They were methodological recommendations for the teachers in village schools. The books are about life in villages, farming and radioactivity.”
For many years after the accident nobody in the affected areas knew what they should do in their everyday lives. Courses on radioactivity safety were arranged in the schools, but there were no teaching materials.
Alexander, who at the time was deputy inspector for the village school, contacted the Institute for In-service Training of Teachers in Gomel about collaboration. ”My first brochure was called ’Protect Yourself and Your Country’. It was a book about methods for working in an area with high radioactivity. The last brochure was called ’Smart Agriculture’. It was written in a question and answer format. There are 150 questions and 150 answers. It gives agricultural-ecological explanations about our work in nature, in the forest and in agriculture. It explains how to do things in a particular way. In the first part I give information about what people should do. In the second part there is an explanation of why they should do these things. People need to have some knowledge about this.
Only 300-500 copies were published but there were no other materials for all the villages. The government did not publish anything but Alexander would not comment on why. ”I didn’t want to start a fight. I was diplomatic,” he says.
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