The Eshelman Family

 

Tonya and Cecil: A Russian-American Adventure in Faith  

By Steve Crain, Southern Pines, NC

(This piece was originally written in 1997 and published in “The Pilot”)

  

“How much does it cost?” Tonya’s brother asked her as she came in from the Siberian cold, returning from a meeting at Ilyinka Church in Novokuznetsk, Russia, in the autumn of 1993.

Tonya, a teacher who lived in Novokuznetsk with her family, took off her coat, straightened her brown hair, turned her small 5-foot, 4-inch frame toward her brother and looked at him with her soft, green eyes.

“How much does it cost?” Andrey said, repeating his question. “You know. The opium for the people.”

“It’s free,” said Tonya Galkina (now Tonya Eshelman), smiling.  

She understood her brother’s humor. He was quoting from the satirical novel “The Twelve Chairs” by Ilf and Petroff. In that book, a swindler asks a priest the question that Tonya’s brother posed. That question grew out of this statement by Karl Marx: “Religion…is the opium of the people.”

Tonya shared her 19-year-old brother’s feelings about religion until the summer of 1993, when she experienced a major change of heart – a change that would take her from Siberia to the Sandhills of North Carolina in the United States.

Tonya was born in 1968 in Novokuznetsk, a city of over 600,000 (in 1997) in southwest Siberia. Novokuznetsk, a sister city to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is much (in 1997) like the Pittsburgh of the late 1960s – coal mines and steel mills. The mills of Novokuznetsk (which means “New Blacksmith”) prospered when only they supplied steel to the Soviet Republics, but they had to begin competing on the open world market.

 

Her Family

 

Tonya’s grandparents on both sides worked hard on collective farms.

Her father, Alexey, worked as a coal-industry manager, a teacher, a trainer for the unemployed, a full-time Communist Party worker and a commercial director. Her mother Lyudmilla, worked as a nurse.

“I had a happy childhood,” Tonya says. “We were probably middle or lower-middle class.” She says “classes” did exist under communism. “I was optimistic. I wanted to get a good education and get married.”

She had no religious training, but she remembers that her great aunt was Russian Orthodox and “prayed to her icons.” When Tonya was about eight years old, she heard her great aunt say something about God. Tonya responded quickly. 

“There is no God!” Tonya told her aunt. “The teacher said there is no God.”

Tonya’s father took her aside and scolded, saying, “You must respect old people and their religion. You don’t correct them. You don’t know there is no God.”

 

The Translator

 

After high school graduation, Tonya entered the Novokuznetsk Pedagogical Institute to study Russian language and literature. She found college boring and quit after one year. When she dropped out of college, her father didn’t speak to her for two weeks. When he spoke, he said, “Get a job.”

Tonya began working as an assistant teacher and housemaid at The Number Three Orphanage. There she saw the sad lives of children who were unwanted because of family or medical problems.

Realizing that her own life would be hard without an education, she returned to college after working one year at the orphanage. Her college advisor steered her into elementary education with an emphasis on teaching English. She finished college in June 1993, ready to teach English or German.

A teacher told Tonya about two young Norwegian missionaries who needed an English-to-Russian translator. Tonya traveled about five hours by train with the two men to Sheregesh, a small town located south of Novokuznetsk. She translated conversations and sermons at a church youth camp in the Shore Mountains at Sheregesh.

Tonya’s mother had told her, “I hope you won’t receive their faith.”

At that time, most Russians believed all evangelical groups were sects with bizarre practices, Tonya says.

“I had heard that Baptists sometimes sacrificed their children,” Tonya says.

As she translated for the Norwegians, Tonya remained detached.

“Sometimes I would be translating,” she says, laughing, “and I would be thinking that if I were a certain lady in that audience, I wouldn’t wear those trousers.”

Her interest in religion grew.

A week and a half after her arrival in Sheregesh, Tonya went on a hike with a youth group. As she looked down from a mountain at beautiful scenery, she thought of what she had recently learned about God. She thought about her life and about how small she seemed in the world.

Feeling overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape that lay before her, she prayed her first prayer.

“Thank you, God, for this beautiful creation,” she said.

During the third and last week of the camp, Tonya translated a sermon. As the speaker ended his sermon, he asked respondents to repeat words he prayed as he led them in a “sinner’s prayer” to receive Jesus Christ as Savior. As Tonya translated that prayer, it became her own, she says.

Two weeks later, some Australian missionaries explained the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” to her, and she was filled with the Spirit as they prayed with her.

 

The Attack

 

Tonya traveled with the two Norwegians and with two Russian girls (one was an artist) to the remote village of Ust-anzas, located 30 minutes by helicopter from Sheregesh. There were no access roads leading through the thick forests surrounding the faming village of Ust-anzas, and electricity was available only from six to nine o’clock in the evenings.

“It was like the ‘Wild West,’” Tonya says. “They had a library and an official building for meetings, but all the buildings were log cabins.”

The village librarian and her husband knew the Norwegians and had asked them to travel to her village to baptize her.

“Three days after we arrived, she and I were baptized in the river,” Tonya says. “I was very happy. The librarian’s husband, Roman, took us to help an old man gather hay for his horse. On the second day of our work in the fields, as we returned in the evening to the village, someone told us that some prisoners from a nearby labor camp had escaped. I didn’t think much about it.”

Roman and his wife returned to their home. Tonya’s group returned to their cabin.

“The two ministers were in one room, and we three ladies were in the other,” Tonya says. “We were awakened at 2:00 a.m. by loud banging and demands that we open the door. Then they broke down the door!”

She says that the first of the three men to enter their room said with a loud, mocking voice, “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you! Why didn’t you open?”

“One man held a flashlight, and one had a butcher knife which he put to my throat,” Tonya says. “They were the escaped prisoners, and they had been drinking.

Tonya’s voice rises as she recalls that the leader of the escaped prisoners shouted, “I’m the Devil!”

“Then they tried to harass the artist girl, but she fainted,” says Tonya, whose voice softens before she adds, “Then the leader assaulted me.”

Tonya pauses before continuing.

“Maybe it was one of the ministers or the artist girl who revived and slipped out unnoticed – I don’t know – but someone brought help,” she says. “I began to hear dogs barking and voices in the distance. The youngest of the three men ran away before our rescuers burst into the cabin and severely beat the remaining two escapees and tied them up. We all went to Roman’s home. I was distraught and could not stop crying.”

Prison guards came that morning and asked for a report.  When the guards left, Tonya’s friends returned to work in the fields near the village.

“I was very depressed and wanted to go home to Novokuznetsk,” Tonya says. “The helicopter, scheduled to come the next day, was said to be grounded because of lack of funds for fuel. I went to the attic of Roman’s cabin and prayed, ‘God, if you’re really there, please send the helicopter.’ I cried some more and fell asleep.”

She slept for a few hours and woke to the sound of a helicopter.

“I ran to the landing site,” Tonya says. “It was a military helicopter hired by Czechoslovakian tourists. The officer said he could not wait for my friends to come from the fields. I begged, ‘Will you take me?’”

He said, “Sure, if you are back here in one hour.”

“I ran to Roman’s cabin and wrote a note,” Tonya says. “I flew back to Sheregesh and immediately took a train home to Novokuznetsk. My friends were stuck in the village for two more weeks.”

 

Doubts and Renewal

 

“I was depressed and began to have doubts about my new faith,” Tonya says. “I asked, ‘Why, God?’ I wondered why the prisoners came to our cabin. I wasn’t sure the preachers had done all they could to defend me. I just wanted to forget it all.”

Within a few days, the pastor of the church in Sheregesh called and invited Tonya to his wedding to be held in Novokuznetsk.

“I hesitated,” Tonya says, “but I was curious, especially about a Russian wedding with no alcohol. I went to the wedding on August 10 (1993) and was encouraged by the Christian atmosphere. At the wedding I met Ilya, a Russian preacher, and his American wife, Janet. She was from Canada.”

Janet said, “I have been here two months and have spoken with only two people – my husband and God.”

“She was so happy that I spoke English,” Tonya says. “We became good friends.”

At the end of August 1993, Tonya began teaching English in a Siberian public school. At about that same time Ilya and Janet, sponsored by the Canadian Assemblies of God, started Ilyinka Church in Novokuznetsk. Tonya became a faithful member.

In June 1994, her church sent Tonya to the local airport to meet an American. She created a sign to hold, so that the tall, slender visiting American could find her in the crowd. She wrote his name in large letters: “ESHELMAN.”

 

The American

 

Cecil Eshelman was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 1963. He grew up in Warrensburg, Missouri, near Kansas City.

At a Boy Scout camp, he confirmed his Christian faith at age 14. At the University of Missouri at Rolla, some Christian classmates challenged and inspired him. He received the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” in his senior year of college. He graduated in computer science in 1985 and worked two years in a prison alternative program, later he also traveled with The Covenant Players, a Christian drama group.

From August 1990 to January 1994, Eshelman worked at Cameron Boys’ Camp, a Southern Baptist therapeutic camp for boys near Cameron, N.C., and attended Sandhills Assembly of God in Southern Pines, N.C.

He made his first trip to Russia in March 1994 on a Book of Life distribution effort, using his personal savings and gifts from friends to finance his trip.

In June 1994, the camp director for KMK Steel (a large steel producer in Novokuznetsk that provided summer camps for their employees’ children) invited Eshelman to return and tell Bible stories at camps where communist pioneer training for young people once took place.

 

Attraction

 

Eshelman stayed six months in Novokuznetsk, first working in summer camps and then extending his visa to work in public schools. He returned to the U.S., but Tonya and he continued corresponding.

Tonya traveled with missionaries to Canada in July 1995, and Cecil met her in London, Ontario, for five days. She returned to Russia in September, and Cecil traveled to Novokuznetsk for a 2-week visit. He then flew to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and spent almost one year teaching English in the public schools and teaching in a Bible school during evenings.

In August 1996, Eshelman flew to Irkutsk, Siberia. Tonya traveled two days by train from Novokuznetsk with Canadian missionary friends to vacation at Lake Biakal near Irkutsk.

“On the shore of Lake Biakal, I asked Tonya to marry me,” Eshelman says. “We were married in Novokuznetsk on October 26, 1996.”

“I didn’t know that the name on the sign I held at the airport would someday be my last name,” Tonya says, laughing. “It was snowing on the day we were married. It was the first snow (of the season) that stayed, and it was beautiful. We went for a week to a ski lodge in Sheregesh for our honeymoon.”

 

 

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