Many people describe Belarus as that neighbouring country next to Russia which has Europe’s last dictatorship. As I write this, the country has seen some of its most violent protests and street demonstrations since the birth of the nation in 1994. Belarus was born into the political rule of President Alexander Lukashenko, who believed that the coronavirus pandemic could have be solved by drinking vodka and visiting the sauna; perhaps a novel and refreshing idea for us in Britain? When Lukashenko later contracted the virus, he told reporters how, ‘He recovered on his feet’ and that it would be, ‘…better to die standing on your feet than to live on your knees’. With his two opposition leaders in prison, and many being detained in the ongoing protests, the future for his presidency is in question. Some have theorised that the relatively low Covid death rates are not because of the lack of lockdown and relative calm handling of the outbreak, rather, some have said that the low death rates may in fact be that Belarus as a country just isn’t travelled to that much. Myself, being one of such a presumed minority of travellers, went alone on a trip to Western Belarus in a small bus the size of a transit van to meet Pastor Oleg and his family who invited me to stay with them in Grodno one snowy December.
The curtains of the bus that took me to Grodno were a 70s flannel cloth of brown, bright pink and orange. As we departed the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, I looked out through the kitsch curtains as more snow fell and the window became hard to slide shut. Behind me sat two Belarussian men. One was a well-known handball player, and in their broken English they asked me, quite bewildered, why it was that I was coming to Belarus? As in the Covid theory, not many people actually travel to Belarus in comparison to neighbouring Poland or Lithuania, so when I told them that I was travelling there because I’d had a dream that I would go to Belarus and then the following week I met a Belarussian family in Latvia who invited me to stay with them, they seemed quite suspicious of me but thoroughly intrigued at the same time.
More than half of the tourists that come to Belarus each year come from neighbouring Russia. Since Russia shut down its casinos, there has been an increase in gambling travellers to Minsk the capital, which I would unfortunately not visit this time. I was en-route for a small Western region called Grodno, where I would be greeted by my new friend Oleg and his wife, in a snowy, deserted car park. I had been given a 5-day tourist visa specifically for Grodno so the visa meant I could only stay in this area.
In the last few years, travel has changed a lot in Belarus, with the introduction of a 30-day visa. Before this, getting a visa could be a difficult procedure that was expensive and time consuming when crossing the border.
My own border check took a couple of hours. Every one around me was speaking Russian and I managed to preamble my way through the metal detectors and passport checks, though I was met with looks of suspicion being an English girl all alone travelling to Grodno in the late of a cold, snowy winters night.
Seeing so many guards armed with machine guns in the black fur Russian-style hats was quite exciting. They searched the bus thoroughly as we waited in the transit station. My own passport check was greeted with a raised eyebrow or two when examining my photo which showed me in my younger years with bleach blonde wavy hair, whereas now I stood before them like a completely different woman with my naturally straight, dark brown hair.
The whole bus journey I sat, wondering if Oleg would remember to pick me up. The handball player and his friend were playing loud music behind me. They kept asking me questions and I wondered if they were suspicious of me, along with, what I thought, was perhaps everyone else. He gave me an Oreo and asked for my social media details but soon enough we arrived in Grodno and Oleg and his wife greeted me with great open arms and took my bags. The handball player and his friend were surprised and said goodbye as I was rushed off to Oleg’s family home to meet his daughter, two sons and their Labrador Hagai, to dine on some white sliced bread with round bits of ham and cream cheese.
Since I left my home in December to travel, I seemed to always be put into the spare room with the piano. Myself being a pianist, I felt this was some gentle nudge from God to say, you must play your music! In Belarus, like it had been in previous travels to Slovakia and Sweden, I was always put in the room with the piano.
When I woke up the next morning from my bus journey, I saw outside the great Soviet apartment blocks that sat like pastel monuments in the snow. Everything outside was pastel pink, peach and grey in the bright white snow. There was a moment when I thought that I was rather mad just jumping on a bus to Belarus to meet Oleg and his family but I knew that I was being led by God and his ways were much greater than mine.
My first meeting with Oleg and his family was in Latvia. I was helping out at a Christian training event in an old theatre in the capital city Riga. We had spent the weekend baptising, praying and singing. I prayed for a girl who had a sore back and she introduced me to her family.
‘Where are you from?’, I asked.
‘Belarus!’, was the enthusiastic reply that I will always remember so fondly from Oleg, who was a big man with dark black hair.
It was then that I told them how it was that I came to be in Latvia and why it was I wanted to come to their home country of Belarus.
When I left England, I was walking in faith that God wanted me to sell my things, leave my rented house in Sheffield and buy a one-way ticket to Latvia to follow where the Spirit would lead me. I had just £300 in my account. I bought a small cabin suitcase and a little black backpack. My one-way ticket to Latvia was for the intention of helping at a Christian event that I myself had attended in Slovakia as an attendee. I rang the team and asked if I could come and help. I was thereafter plunged into a rather insane world of prayer deliverance and baptism that I had never experienced in the church but ironically enough was certainly in the Bible scriptures of the New Testament.
A few thousand people filled an old theatre on the outskirts of Riga, the Art Nouveau capital of Eastern Europe.
Hundreds of people came forward to be baptized in big green garden tubs filled with water, up on the old wooden stage, but the water stopped working and they simply couldn’t fill all the tubs, so the team assigned four or more people to baptise in various homes and apartments around the city while a few stayed behind to use the only tub that had water.
We went to the home of Laima. She was a mid-twenties Latvian who lived in the ex-soviet apartment blocks that accommodate a lot of the Riga populous. We baptised four there. One was a young woman who struggled in the baptism because she didn’t believe that she was worthy to know God. I told her that she must tell the devil that she divorced him and, after that quick declaration, we prayed for her to receive the Holy Spirit and she filled up like an empty fountain overflowing with new wine. It was such a beautiful experience. Like in the Book of Acts in the New Testament, it appeared clearly that she was filled with the Holy Spirit and then started praying in new tongues; an unknown language that flows out like a river.
We sat afterwards in the 1970s décor and ate bowls of Satsumas and raisins.
Riga in December was icy and grey. The old trams that took us back and forth to town had that kitchen turquoise interior of a 1950s American kitchen. Coming up into the centre of the city, the remnants of the once functional balcony metalwork hung precariously in dereliction. The pastel colours of the flaking wall paint echoed the reminiscences of its Soviet past and the men and women wearing Russian hats and other wares of fur shuffled along to the Christmas markets accompanied by the sound of music boxes and soft church bells.
Many artists fled to Riga in the Second World War bringing with them from Paris the popular style of Art Nouveau. As you walk the streets don’t forget to look up, because there on the roof precipices are ancient sculptures and embellished faces that sternly stare down for recognition.
At the tram stop, the river that ran beside the track line was frozen solid. Across the road stands the impressive 1930s market complex, built from reused German Zeppelin Hangars, its five pavilions being five of nine Zeppelin hangars that still exist worldwide. Listed as a World UNESCO site in 1998, the market, being the biggest in Europe, was built in the Art Deco and Neoclassical style. Inside, stalls sell everything from trays of ox tongues to garish ceramic pots, knitted socks, mittens and towers upon towers of colourful Russian dolls. And from one market to another, this time of year boasts an impressive Christmas market in the old town which was also made a World UNESCO site.
I made a quick visit to the Christmas market with a group of volunteers from Holland. One was called Ton. He was a former Hells Angel with a chopper but is now what you could call a Heavens Angel, a compassionate evangelist who still has the trade mark biker beard, which he wears in a thick plait. I stayed with the team for an extra two days at a hostel on the outskirts of the city centre called The Happy Hotel. I remember the disdain of the woman at the counter when I first arrived, leading one to understand that this Happy Hotel wasn’t particularly akin to its namesake.
There were many Latvian men traversing up and down the stairways in plumes of smoke chatting loudly. Smoking is banned inside, in England, so it is always a little strange when you are in another country where people are allowed to smoke. I remember the smoking in China, the cigarettes were so cheap and packaged in extremely fancy, decorative packets. And in Germany, certainly a smokers country, I don’t think I’ve seen so many cigarette adverts on billboards than I have in Hanover.
I had an interesting experience in Hanover. It was after I’d spent a month in Denmark. I travelled down to Hanover and stayed with a friend called Rebecca. When we walked around the town we came to an enormous Lutheran church that stands in the centre of the town and to the utter dismay and surprise for a Christian like me who used to do witchcraft as a child, there on the 100ft or so height of this medieval church tower was an upside down pentagram in thick black lines on the red brick façade of what would have held the bell tower or a clock face. On the adjacent side was another hexagram in thick black lines. It looked very unsettling and I decided to pray around the church seven times like Joshua and his army marching around the walls of Jericho to bring the walls down. Though I didn’t intend some immediate act of demolition, I did pray that the horrible symbol would disappear or simply be destroyed somehow, obviously not hurting anyone. I once prayed for a Buddha statue in a café I worked in, I came in one morning and instead of having holy oil to anoint the statue with, I had a tub of butter which I prayed over and then anointed the statue with, declaring that any spirits associated with the statue be rebuked in the name of Jesus. The next week, my boss retold the account of the previous day when the whole shelf where the Buddha statue sat had fallen off the wall; all the bottles broke along with the Buddha statue whose head had been clean cut decapitated.
I will often pray over places, especially when I am travelling. The atmosphere of a hotel room can change in a moment when you pray and invite God’s presence to be there instead of everything that has been before.
In the Happy Hotel in Riga, it wasn’t such a bad atmosphere even though the receptionist wasn’t so friendly.
The Dutch team kept me company as I waited for a visa for two days, when I would then take a bus to neighbouring Lithuania and then to Belarus. When the time came, I said goodbye to my Dutch friends and left for the bus station, where I was very drawn to a big group of Indian men who seemed to be travelling across country too.
It wasn’t until I’d been on the bus for some time that I was stopped by one of the men. He had heard me talk on the phone to my friend and the mention of the name of Jesus and ‘making disciples’ had caught his attention.
The young Indian man was called Sharon Ston, and had no appreciative humour that I had about the name comparison to the Hollywood actress Sharon Stone. He had heard my conversation and asked me what it was that I was doing on the bus as he had been praying that God would send him someone to baptise him. He had been brought up an Indian Catholic and had never been baptised properly. He had been baptised as a baby but that didn’t count according to scripture as I explained. He must come to God in his own understanding, belief and faith, and a baby simply does not have the faculty of making such a serious decision.
As he was getting off the bus before me, I arranged with him that I would travel on to Poland after Belarus and come to baptise him in Warsaw where he would meet me. It ended up that after my stay in Belarus, I arranged to meet him with a brother in Warsaw, and everyday he would agree to meet at a certain time and then something would come up and he wouldn’t be able to meet us. This happened for many days until I had to leave Poland and go back to Denmark to start work on a project with the Jesus Hotel and set up a coffee shop in Aalborg called Jesus Café.
I took a small trip when I lived there, and went to Berlin. It was my birthday when I had booked a ticket to travel over to Wrocław in western Poland to stay with a brother in the mountains and pray for a woman who was sick. It ended up that as I arrived at the train station, they said my ticket was not valid as it was for the day before. A silly error on my part or as I would like to believe, divine intervention on God’s part. I changed my plans entirely and decided that because I was so close to the town where Sharon lived that I could much easier get a train to Poznan from Berlin and meet Sharon. It was a wonderful leading of the Spirit as the woman I was staying with had gone to Poznan the previous year and had met a couple who run a home church so I could go straight to them. We invited Sharon around for fellowship and most importantly, to baptise him in Kamil’s bath tub. He said how he felt like a new born baby and later on in the evening he called us and started praying tongues down the phone as he received the gift of tongues alone in his bedroom as he was praying. As I write at a much later date, Sharon met a girl in the home church in Poznan and they are now married and have their first child. It was a lovely testimony of God closing one door so He could open another for a pre-prepared work.
One such work, pre-prepared for me, was in Belarus.
My Belarussian family took me in as their own for a little time.
On my first day there I went with Pastor Oleg to the hotel where his wife and daughter work. It was set in a very snowy thick woodland. As we walked for some time through the woods made ever quiet by the heavy snow, Oleg told me how it is in Belarus for the church. He would often have visiting pastors denied visas and though they were allowed to have free churches, the tension of the political oligarchy was always an overshadowing presence.
Oleg took me to the river and told me how they had baptised their first disciple twenty-seven years ago and how this is the spot they always come to baptise. A man must be born again whatever the weather conditions! It is an emblem of the faith of countries like Belarus or somewhere like Serbia where you can find videos of Christians baptising new converts in holes cut through thick ice in the freezing cold. Some countries don’t even have access to clean water for baptism. Men and women in prison have used the toilet or sink to be baptised. We have baptised some in the harbour in Denmark and it would be bitterly cold, but after a few minutes standing in the water you surely did warm up. At the event in Latvia, they had one tub left on the stage for baptism, so they could do a few baptisms there as we all went off to the homes to baptise. When we came back, everyone was talking about an Eastern European man who had gone to be baptised in what was essentially a huge plastic water butt.
He describes that he felt a huge surge of pride come over him as they started to pray and go to baptise him. He said that as he felt the pride rise up in him, he became uncontrollably angry and pushed back the volunteers and somehow managed to rip the large plastic water butt in two, spilling gallons upon gallons of water across the stage and down to the seats. He had to be held down as he was delivered of an evil spirit. I have never heard of anyone being able to rip a 100-gallon plastic tub in two with his bare hands, but that is the supernatural world of Christianity, when a demon manifests it can enhance a person’s natural strength out of proportion to anything you could ever imagine is possible. A friend of mine once prayed for a man to be delivered of demons. He had a word of knowledge from His Spirit, that he was oppressed by an evil spirit called Thor, traced back to the Norse Thor of course. When he named the spirit as Thor, the man being prayed for stood up with such a great strength that he picked up one of the men praying for him and threw him across the room. My friend then described how he felt God literally put a shield on his chest and then he carried on praying and was not afraid. The man was later delivered of that spirit of Thor and is now walking in the freedom Christ paid for.
I didn’t see any deliverance in Belarus though I did come to pray with people in the church there. One man suffered terribly with depression and I had news that after the visit he is doing much better.
One night I attended the youth group at the church. No one really spoke perfect English so I was mistranslated a few times, but as ever smiles and laughter created an environment of mutual understanding. Igor and his friends prayed fervently for another group of their church who have been sent off on their compulsory military conscription after leaving school. Nowadays, there are talks of new laws to lessen the conscription time if one studies or serves in an alternative ministry. The prayers of Igor and his friends were made with tears and crying out to God that their friends would be safe as they were being sent off to Italy for a military assignment elsewhere. They were truly mourning with their brothers and I was touched, though I understood not their words; I understood their heart entirely. The rest of that night we spent playing music, which to me is the language without any misunderstanding.
When Oleg took me to the hotel where his wife worked, who for the entire journey in Belarus was known to me as, ‘Honey’, I was given a meal of beef salad and broccoli soup. Viktoria, their daughter walked in and both she and her mother started laughing out loud at the realisation that they were wearing the exact same black floral dress. I sat in the empty dining room and listened to the small canary in a golden cage in the corner whistling away. Because it was winter, this opulently decorated hotel nestled in the middle of pine woods was quite deserted. Oleg told me stories about people getting married here in the summer, where outside in the garden, they would put little turtles and fish in the big fountain, and then give them a small tree after the ceremony to plant in the woodland, which would act as some kind of symbolic planting of their new life together.
We visited Grodno city centre the next day. It was a very historic place full of old baroque buildings and catholic churches. One church that we visited was built in the 12th century. The black wooden exterior made it look very old indeed and inside it was full of Christian icon paintings so prevalent here in the Russian Orthodox churches. The acoustics are said to be fantastic for choirs, due to the cylindrical forms coming out of some of the walls.
The ancient Black Rutherian architecture had a colour code system to determine what region of the country you were in, and it was said that this system of identification came from the Mongol invaders led by the grandson of Genghis Khan, Batu Khan in the 1200s.
Kalozha Church stands up on a small hill overlooking the Neman river. On the other side of the water is a derelict building that Oleg told me used to be a brewery but was shut down when the workers started going crazy. It was later found out that the site was a former mental asylum where many committed suicide and were killed.
We took a closer look by the river down a set of steps that are known as the Lover’s steps, as this is where you come to propose to your sweetheart. Such a contrast of sentiment from the ominous building across the water of the former asylum which draws your attention, as light is consumed in the darkness of an overcast shadow.
Further into the centre of Grodno, I was shown the grand St Francis Xavier Cathedral, with all its extravagant gilt gold altars and centre pieces. The chandeliers were excessive and, while it is a sight to be seen, it has nothing to do with the real life of Jesus and His message of humility.
Humility is something I have found in Oleg, his family and his church. They have been building their house for some years, and like a lot of houses in Poland that I have seen, the outside is the bare grey building blocks, having not been plastered yet. In China, many of the buildings were started and built up to the third floor and only the bottom was plastered and finished because they ran out of money.
The wage isn’t high here in Belarus but Oleg and his family are hard workers and have what they need.
The day before I left, Oleg and I went to a shabby ticket office in town to buy my bus ride to Białystok, the Polish city on the border. I was very blessed to have Oleg sort everything out for me. When we first met, Oleg and his family took me to a Latvian buffet in Riga where we ate some ‘wet chips’, something popular to Latvians, which consist of some fries that are completely saturated with oil. It is common in Latvia to eat three types of meat on one plate and of course, most people drink what in England has become a trendy health craze, the fermented dairy drink of kefir; it’s taste is best described as sour milk with tonic water.
I assured Oleg that when I could come back, I would.
I was grieved to say goodbye to my Belarussian family, but my time had been so fulfilling and I was eager to see Poland, which was another new country for me.
The bus ride took a few hours to the border, where I endured another long border check and raised eyebrows at my passport photo.
In Poland, I went to the McDonalds and started my travelling tradition of comparing the milkshakes in different countries. To this day, as I write this, the best country for a McDonalds milkshake is Ireland. They even have a shamrock milkshake for St Patrick’s Day. Sorry Poland, it just wasn’t the same, but I can definitely afford you the title of best priced trains in Europe. As an English woman to be able to pay just 6 euros to get from one half of the country to the other is a sheer miracle, one I was very grateful for, though for my travels so far I had been blessed with funding and gifts from other Christians. One girl came up to me in Latvia and just gave me 100 euros for my travels, and another took my bank account details and gave me another 100. I was more than provided for and it meant I could travel on to Poland and then eventually journey to Sweden and Denmark where I would live for a year.
Since I became a Christian, I have travelled to over twenty countries in Europe and Africa in the space of a few years. I have done all this with supernatural provision from God. Sometimes I would just find random money on my bank account, or a brother or sister in the faith would bless me with exactly what I needed at the time. I was sent to countries I never imagined I would go to and was looked after by the most wonderful of people. Life with God truly is an adventure. We are, as Christians, sojourners in the land and I know that my life will carry on to be one of exciting pilgrimage all thanks to God and His great plans and purposes.
Written by Hannah Eve 2021. All writing and photography copyrighted by Hannah Eve Szczepek, 2021 ©.
Great work!