Olwyn Keogh help several children affected by Chernobyl disaster
The Friends of Chernobyl’s Children charity has brought hundreds of young people to the county for recuperative care. The project had expanded enormously, said Charity founder Olwyn Keogh.
“We bring over 600 children a year to the county and rest of the UK, there’s no point in bringing them just once, you need to bring them for four or five years to give them constant recuperative care to make a difference to their health,” she said.
It all started in October 1994, when one little Belarusian girl came to stay with Mrs Keogh MBE at her home in Blackburn.
Mrs Keogh decided that more needed to be done to help others and the next year, through church fundraising, 50 children came from Belarus for a four-week recuperative visit to east Lancashire.
Since then the charity has grown and today there are 31 Friends of Chernobyl’s Children (FOCC) groups across the country, with Mrs Keogh now the charity’s director.
Children from orphanages or disadvantaged homes, aged between six and 13, are helped by the charity if they find it difficult for them to get the care they require at home.
On 26 April 1986 an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant left huge parts of Ukraine and Belarus contaminated. It was a crisis 25 years ago that prompted a Lancashire woman to want to help the young victims of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
