Citas Petryna -b-

- Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations-

"(...) Some maintenance workers lived government-constructed housing units in Kyiv, the country's capital, sixty miles south of the disaster area. They work in the zone for two weeks and then return home for two weeks. I met one such worker in 1992, the first time I traveled to the country. He identified himself as a "sufferer", a legal classification instituted in 1991 for Chernobyl-affected individuals. He complained about how little his compensation (about five U.S. dollars a month) was in relation to rising food prices. The man was in absolute despair, trapped because he had nowhere else to work. He said he had attempted to find employment elsewhere, but nobody would hire him on account of his bad health and work history. The man linked his suffering to first a precarious and dangerous Soviet management of the aftermath, and then a complex medical and legal apparatus he felt unable to navigate. He then showed me a work injury, a flap of skin that had puckered and formed a kind of ring just above his ankle. Direct contact with a source of ionizing radiation had apparently caused it. His sense of violation and loss were clear when he referred to himself as a "living dead", whose memory of who he was in a former life "is gone"."