stay for only 10 minutes because of the high level of radioactive contamination. There I found only a very few leaf bugs, all of them disturbed. In Polesskoje to the west, outside the 30-kilometer exclusion zone but still very heavily contaminated, I found the people in great misery. They had not been evacuated after the accident because their territory lies outside the exclusion zone. We also visited Slavoutich, a town that had been specially built for refugees from the Chernobyl disaster. It lies about 90 kilometers north of Kiev. Many children there were ill, and at the time there was only one nurse and no doctor to treat all the sick people there. When we met the nurse, she cried out all her misery. [ 3 ]