A CHARITY based in Westbury is looking for sponsors who can change a child's life for just £10 a month.

Chernobyl Children in Need is dedicated to helping villagers, especially children, in Ozarichi, a village in Belarus just outside the exclusion zone set up after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Chairman, Adrian Walker, said: "Often there is a welfare as well as a medical need with these children and £10 will provide all their food.

"They will still live in a contaminated environment but having food that is free of contaminants does make a difference."

The charity tries to find sponsors for a group of children at a time, with helpers in Belarus forwarding the names of those they think need help most urgently.

At the moment it has a file of 11 children, all suffering from the long-term effects of the deadly radiation released at Chernobyl before most of them were even born.

All the children have thyroid problems and weak immune systems.

In most cases they live in poverty and many of them have fathers who have long-since deserted their families, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Mr Walker said: "They have very little. The lowest-paid adults earn about US$15 a month but even a doctor would only get about US$45. Despite that they are a very warm and generous people and whatever they have they would share with you."

Chernobyl Children in Need was set up in 1999 and it was decided that efforts would be concentrated on this one village.

Mr Walker said: "We didn't want to spread what we could do too thinly and there are lots of different charities working in different areas.

"In this village they had never even seen anyone one from the West before."

There are about 500 children in the village and, of the 310 at the main school, 282 suffer from the effects of radiation, many having blood disorders, heart defects and leukaemia.

It is at the school that the charity has begun its first major project in the village this month.

The toilets the children have to use are just holes in the ground, about 100 yards away from the school building, and the charity is funding the building of a new, hygienic toilet block, at a cost of £19,000.