Friday, September 1. 11.15pm. Phone call to say the minibus, with its 11 Chernobyl children on board, has reached Ashburton and should be with us by midnight. It feels late but what it feels like for the children who left their Belarussian homes 22 hours, two coach trips and a pan-European flight earlier, I can't imagine. I also can't think straight owing to the anxiety caused by the thought of sharing our tiny South Hams home with two city girls we're told are likely to be ill, anxious and without a word of English. Feel like a cornered beast and irrationally angry. Also worried that an earlier nerve-calming whisky will make me reek like a wino and render social services to think me an unfit parent in loco before I've even tried. Saturday, September 2. 12.30am. Stagger in from the midnight blackness and through the brightly lit front door of our cottage with the wide-eyed Olga and Svyetalania and their meagre luggage in tow. Am taken aback by their gasps of grateful astonishment when they see the exceptionally modest room in which they'll be staying for a month. Their gasps are nothing however, compared to ours – five minutes later, the two girls thunder down stairs, their arms laden with gift after gift for 'Neyegheel and Deeann'. Cut glass vases, boxes of chocolates, good luck charms, Russian dolls, pictures they've made from scraps of this and that and even a hand made rug that must have taken one of their families literally hundreds of hours to lovingly complete. Their voices are a non-stop excited babble and their faces burnished with ear-to-ear smiles which say more than words ever could. These children and their families, whom we know to have nothing – not even the chance of healthy bodies – have given us a small fortune from both their pockets and their hearts. We had always assumed that it would be us doing all the giving and yet within five minutes these two self-assured 10-year-olds had changed all that and completely knocked us off our feet. There's no stopping the floods of tears which stream down our faces as we embrace, realising that if anything, this month together is going to teach us to expect the unexpected. Sunday, September 3: Took the girls to Beesands. 'Our' girls have never seen the sea before and Olga asks if this is the Black Sea. At first they're reluctant to paddle, the waves stacking up and crashing on to the pebbly beach. But with a bit of trouser-rolling and a 'this is how you do it' approach they're soon both in and screaming with joy as we all receive the inevitable drenching. When the cheap kites we'd bought fail to soar in the stiff offshore breeze, however, they shoot us city girl looks which say something like 'Country bumpkins.' Never been put down by a 10-year-old before. Wednesday, September 6: Although the girls seem happy we've been concerned about the meagre amounts of food they are eating. Good food is central to our way of life, we'd rather buy a decent joint and bottle of wine than a new DVD player. Then it struck me: get out the cook books where pictures knock words into a cocked hat. 'Wow, Geeaymee Orleeva!' exclaimed Olga who we discover prefers to be called Orla. 'We see Geeaymee on TV.' The next half hour is a revelation as the girls flick through the pages clapping their hands and screaming, 'Da da da,' when they spot a familiar dish. Their absolute favourite is, of all things, cheese on toast, so an extra loaf and slab of tasty cheddar is added to the shopping list. Saturday, September 9: The week has flown by doing this and that and the girls are eating like the proverbial horses. Orla's understanding of English it turns out is very good and, perhaps unfairly, she has become our teacher and unofficial translator. Her maturity for a 10- year-old is incredible and we wonder just how tough her life must be to produce such resilience in one so young. Yet seeing her absorbed with the cheap doll she chose in Woolies brings a sharp reminder of her tender years and need for gentle nurturing. Svyeta has an impish nature, all cutesy smiles and a devilish sense of humour. Not as confident as Orla and with very little English she uses game playing and a bit of cheek to make her mark. Her favourite pastime is to prod me in the chest, I look down and she pinches my nose. The first time it happened I laughed uncontrollably. The 89th time is no less amusing, and I take it as a sign of her feeling safe with me. The most humbling and amazing aspect of our seven days together is the deep and undisguised joy they get from the mundane, such as putting a coin in the supermarket trolley or being able to flush paper down the toilet as we have a working sewerage system. As Di and I settle down to watch The Last Night of the Proms, the girls' endless chatter and giggles drifting down from their bedroom above, it all becomes too much. With the century-old proms a symbol of continuity, our sense of place and, above all, affluence and security, I could do nothing but think of the girls' lives in Soviet-style tower blocks in a land crippled by poverty and radiation, a land where deaths outnumber births and no child is completely free of sickness. A land to which Orla and Svyeta are completely loyal and in which they hope to grow up and become proud Belarussians. For the second time in a week the tears come, only this time the sobbing is uncontrolled and lasts a full five minutes, my head buried in Di's neck lest the world should see me. Survivor's guilt, I guess.