Finding Banni: The boy my family tried to adopt but were blocked | Chernobyl Documentary
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Published 2021-04-26
In 2000 I came home from school one day to find a small boy I had never seen before sitting on the couch in my living room. I was 12 years old and my mother explained to me, my brother and sister, that this was Banni, an orphan from Belarus who would be staying with us for two weeks.
Banni was different. He was seven years old but looked about three or four. He swung his head back and forth constantly, made quiet humming noises, and was constantly grinding his teeth. This, we would later learn, was as a result of years of confinement to a small cot in the orphanage. He had come to our home in Ireland from an orphanage in a town called Gorodisce in Belarus. We were told that, like so many other children, his physical and mental conditions were a result of the radiation from the Chernobyl Nuclear disaster in 1986. He was shy and nervous, as were we. We didn’t know what to make of him or how to interact but that would soon change.
As time went on our family fell in love with Banni and we decided to adopt him. After a year and a half of going through the adoption process, we thought everything was going well, until one day when Banni disappeared and had to go back to Belarus.
A documentary film by Colm Flynn, originally broadcast on RTÉ in Ireland.
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