Page 64 - Phonebox Magazine July 2016

Iryna’s Story
A teenage girl’s battle with the Home Of ce
IBy Steve Clark
t was a beautiful sunny afternoon in a pub garden in Padstow. Opposite me across the table sat 15-year old Iryna Mynich- Voysey, who was born in Ukraine but
now lives in Cornwall. To my left sat Terence and Heather Voysey, the loving couple from Bodmin who opened up their home and their lives to welcome Iryna to live with them after she was orphaned by the murder of her mother. Laughter resounded around the table as Terence recalled some of the more memorable moments of trips through Europe with the couple’s trusty camper van. Iryna could barely sti e her peals of delighted giggling as those memories were recalled. You don’t need to spend many minutes in Iryna’s company before you realise that she is amazingly articulate and uent in English for somebody who has spent such a short time in this country. She is also utterly adorable, which explains why the Bodmin community have taken her into their hearts. Sadly, Iryna’s happy life in Cornwall is potentially under
threat. The Home Of ce seems to believe that Iryna doesn’t deserve love and happiness here in the UK but should be deported back to Ukraine to live in an orphanage. They have even con scated her passport, which means that they could forcibly carry out their intentions.
Iryna was born on 26th April 2001 in a remote village a couple of hours drive west of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Exactly fteen years earlier the area had been devastated by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion. The disaster spread a plume of radioactivity over the whole area, leaving a legacy of contamination for many generations to come. A number of organisations across Europe and further a eld operate schemes whereby children from the affected area can travel out of Ukraine and Belarus to stay with host families to give them a break from the contamination of their home area. The Chernobyl Children’s Life Line, a registered charity formed in 1992 has over 150 groups across the UK. Their aim
is to host children from the contamination zone by bringing them over to the UK for around a month each summer to provide them with fresh air, uncontaminated food, fun, love and attention. The children also get dental and optical checks while they are here. It was thus that Iryna found herself a guest of the Voyseys in 2012. While Iryna was here, the Voyseys were given the news that her mother had been brutally murdered back home in Ukraine. It was later discovered that Iryna’s father had walked out prior to her birth, so she was now effectively an orphan. On returning to Ukraine, Iryna found herself being responsible for the care of her elderly grandmother at the age of 11.
Independently of the charity, Terence and Heather decided to invite Iryna to live with them in Bodmin. This approach was
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64 Phonebox Magazine | July 2016