Category: Slovakia Memoir

It was thirty years ago this month that I first stepped foot on Slovak soil. The Slovak Republic was just six months old. I was part of a group of 25 on a mission trip from Calvary Baptist Church in Holland, Michigan. Little did I know then that that trip would be the beginning of relationships that have spanned 30 years.

A year later I was on my second trip to Slovakia. This time with Joe Ann and the Calvary High School choir plus Pastor Grooms and a few more chaperones. The young people sang 20 times in 10 days, played basketball against Slovak high school teams, met with high school English classes, and had weekend concerts in churches and a city auditorium.

Then, in 1997, Joe Ann and I sold everything in the U.S. and moved to Slovakia at the invitation of the Baptist church in Banska Bystrica. Lord willing, I will again be in Banska Bystrica next week. Traveling with me will be one of those high school students from 1994.

This and the story that spanned the next twelve years is covered in the memoir that I completed this spring and has now been published. It is available on Amazon. Although the bulk of the book is my memory of our years in Slovakia, there is a backstory that tells how Joe Ann and I met and what happened in the ten years before we went to Slovakia. It concludes with an epilogue of the years after we returned to the U.S. until Joe Ann’s death last year.

I chose the three words, Courage to Change, in the title because it is part of the Serenity Prayer. The burden of our hearts from the beginning was to share the experience, strength, and hope that comes with recovery from addiction. However, for everyone who experienced God-enabled change during our years in Slovakia, including the two of us, it took courage to change those things in our lives that needed changing.

This fall the book will be translated into the Slovak language for those with whom we shared our lives who cannot read it in English.

Sitting in my study on Christmas Eve in 2022, while there is a blizzard outside, I am remembering fondly one of my favorite celebrations of Christmas in Slovakia. It took place probably 15 or 16 years ago and was celebrated at the end of a week in July with a group of a dozen children and half that many adults.

For three years in Slovakia we organized summer residential camps for children who had a parent addicted to alcohol. For one week these children between the ages of seven and twelve were out of their normal home environment spending time with adults and other children who understood them and knew what it was like to be growing up in a family where everything revolved around alcohol.

We had decided to make the theme of this particular week of summer camp a celebration of birthdays. Many times children who live with an alcoholic parent don’t have wonderful memories of birthday and holiday celebrations. There are times when a parent doesn’t show up or someone is drunk or maybe there is no celebration. There may be fighting and tension and sometimes more tears than laughter.

We decided we would celebrate every child’s and every adult’s birthday at camp that week. Each day of the week we celebrated all those who had a birthday in a three month period. Monday we celebrated January, February and March birthdays. On Tuesday we celebrated those who had birthdays in April, May and June, and so on through Thursday. Since the children’s parents would come for them on Saturday after lunch, we reserved Friday night to celebrate Christmas and the birth of Jesus.

Paper, and stamp art material, stickers, colored pencils and everything needed to make birthday cards and write birthday wishes were available. Every afternoon there was time to prepare cards and put them in a special mailbox to be delivered to the recipients that evening. Special desserts of cake or ice cream were on the menu each day. Everyone at camp that week had a special time to be recognized and celebrated.

Joe Ann and I had a lovely artificial tree which we brought to camp. As a part of our daily activities we prepared for our Christmas celebration. The children made the decorations for the tree – paper chains, snowflake cutouts, and more. We strung the lights and added some special ornaments. One day cookies were baked and everyone decorated cookies.

On Friday we had the Jesus birthday cake, a special round, three-layer cake with a chocolate cake layer on the bottom, strawberry in the middle layer, and a layer with green food coloring on the top. The cake had white icing and around the outer circumference of the cake were chocolate hearts and in the center of the cake was a single candle.

After we finished eating our cake, we shared its symbolism. The colored cake layers represented the reason for Jesus’ coming – our sinful, fallen nature, the blood of Christ shed for us, and new life for those who receieved his gift of eternal life by trusting in him. The round cake represented the world and the chocolate hearts the people of the world. The center candle represented Jesus, the light of the world. Then we had a short program that included the Christmas story, some singing of carols and a small candle for each child to light from the larger candle and place on top of the cake.

Finally, there were gifts. A church responsible for distributing the Samaritan’s Purse shoebox gifts to children in Slovakia had some boxes left from the last Christmas. They shared them with us and we were able to put under the tree an appropriate gift box for each boy and each girl at camp filled with games, candies, stuffed animals and other items. It was a joyful time for all of us.

Tonight I hold in my mind the joy of that July Christmas celebration, remembering each child, wondering what has become of them and saying a prayer that they have received the gift that Jesus offered them.

Dali showed us through the empty flat that was to be our new home. For sure it didn’t look like home but it had a lot going for it. There was a good-sized living room with windows that overlooked the street, a bedroom with a balcony on the backside of the flat, a guest room, and another room right inside the door to the right that would become our office; it was the only room that was carpeted. The kitchen was small but adequate. The toilet was in a tiny space like a small closet separated from the bathroom. In the bathroom was a deep tub, a sink that overlapped the tub with enough space next to it to put a washing machine.

The church placed a small refrigerator and table and chairs in the kitchen for our use until we purchased our own. The kitchen was a narrow L-shaped room. You could enter the top of the L from the entry room. It contained a small gas stove and oven, a sink, and a short counter top with cabinets above and below. You could enter the bottom side of the L from the living room. Right inside was the refrigerator and then an old-fashioned standing radiator beneath three side-by-side windows like those in the living room. The small table was pushed up against the radiator leaving room for three chairs on the open sides of the table.

The most unsual feature of the flat was that there was bright red linoleum with flecks of pink on the floors in the living room and bedrooms. It seems that when the building was erected, red linoleum was put on the odd-numbered floors and gray linoleum of the even-numbered floors.

As there were no closets in the flat, we would need to purchase wardrobes for the bedroom to hang our clothes and some kinds of shelves for storing various items. I was beginning to make a list in my head as we moved through the flat. I love to decorate and since we had to start from scratch to furnish the place, I was excited to think about what we could do with it.

When Joe Ann and I merged our belongings in our first house in Grand Rapids, we saw that we both had a lot of decorative items that were oriental – a Japanese silk screen, paintings of Chinese landscapes, celadon vases from Korea, ink sketches with black bamboo frames from Bangladesh, decorative boxes and one or two oriental figurines. This turned out to be ideal for our flat in Banska Bystrica. The red linoleum made us think Chinese!

Part of our living room with the green leather sofa and the Japanese silk screen attached to the wall by Velcro. The other half of the room is in the picture under the title of this blog post.

To go with our red living room floor we bought a black dining table that could seat six, a black etagere on which to display some of our oriental items, a dark green leather sofa and matching chair, and two other chairs with a black base and arms and an oatmeal color fabric. Since the walls were concrete, we hung our Japanese silk screen, our pictures of Chinese landscapes, and the bamboo framed ink sketches with Velcro. We added a couple of silk plants, a table lamp or two and a floor lamp we brought with us from Michigan.

The office was furnished with six tall brown bookcases set side by side covering the space of two walls. They were filled with the 2500 books we brought with us. The majority were music, theology, and addiction and recovery books. To finish the room, we added a desk and another workspace, plus a filing cabinet and a piece of furniture on which we could put a printer and store supplies in the cabinet space below.

For our bedroom we chose a white chest of drawers and white wardrobes. Our floral bedspreads were forest green. In the guest bedroom we placed two Slovak beds, a blond wardrobe and chest of drawers.

The small three-drawer chest we brought with us was in the entry room along with a small white stand and chair for our telephone. On the floor was an octagonal area rug with an oriental design.

Almost all our furniture was purchased at a nabytok (furniture store) one block from our flat. I’m sure they were happy to see us coming time and time again, although they found some of our purchases strange.

The two items not bought there were our appliances. We bought a refrigerator with a freezer section below that was a product of Sweden and a washing machine that was German made. The refrigerator was different enough that everyone who came to our flat took a look inside.

More than thirty American visitors spent time in that flat over the eight plus years we lived there; many stayed overnight. Slovaks in multiples of that number were in and out of our home over the years. We laughed, cried, had dinner parties, counseled individuals, read, prayed, played games, watched movies on the little television that played American VHS tapes, and worked in that space.

Before going to bed on air mattresses that first night, our container parked on the street waiting for another day to be unloaded after paperwork was done, we walked through the rooms again and prayed that God would be honored by the things that took place within those walls.

Writing this brings a flood of memories, a feeling of joy and gratitude, and a sense of peace that we made that flat into a haven for ourselves and others. I felt good about being home every time I walked in the door.

Currently I am writing a memoir of Joe Ann’s and my twelve years in Slovakia. Each month I will be adapting an excerpt from the book to post on this blog. This first entry gives you an idea of where we lived for the first eight years.

On August 12, 1997, Joe Ann Shelton and I left the U.S. to make our home in Slovakia. Woefully ignorant of world geography, most Americans ask us where Slovakia is. When explaining to Michiganders, I hold up my hand to show them the mitten shape of the lower peninsula and then draw a line through the center of my hand while explaining that if you split the lower peninsula from top to bottom and take the Western side of the state you will have an idea of the size of Slovakia with approximately the same population.

When in Texas, I was able to picture for people the country of Slovakia fitting into the panhandle of Texas with room to spare. With both pictures, I suggest they think of each state that touches these areas as other countries each with a different language, as Slovakia has Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the southwest, and the Czech Republic to the northwest.

I had been to Slovakia on a mission trip for the first time in 1993. The young man who interpreted for me was Dalibor Smolnik who was a seminary student at that time. Dalibor came to visit Joe Ann and me in the spring of 1994 to help prepare our high school choir from Calvary Schools to travel to Slovakia in the summer.

In 1995 Joe Ann and I went to England to attend Dali’s wedding to Laura Williams. He then took his bride to Banska Bystrica where he was the pastor of the Baptist church. It was a city in the middle of the country – on the map just above the word Slovakia – which we had not visited on either earlier mission trip. A couple of years later Joe Ann and I felt led to serve in Slovakia, it was Dali and the elders of the Baptist church in Banska Bystrica who extended the invitation for us to come.

Arriving in Vienna the morning of August 13, we loaded our things in a van belonging to Kelly, an American missionary Dali had recruited to pick us up. Soon we started the four-hour drive to our new home. After crossing the border from Austria into Slovakia, we traveled around the capital city of Bratislava, stopped for lunch, and then drove for a couple more hours.

Right after entering Banska Bystrica, Kelly turned onto a long street with eight-story maroon buildings stretching from one end of the block to the other. Each building was a single flat deep. Our address was 25 Bernolakova and our flat (apartment) was on the third floor.

Where we lived was important to us; we wanted to live among the Slovak people and these buildings, called panilaks because they were built out of concrete panels, put us in a densely populated area. From our two mission trips to Slovakia in 1993 and 1994, we had some idea of options. We were not interested in living in a single-family house. We were two older single women. When Dalibor told us he had been looking for a suitable place for us, we were glad that what he found turned out to be a flat in the block of flats on the street where he and Laura lived.

Dali had visited us in Holland, Michigan the year we traveled to Slovakia with the high school choir. He lived in our condominium for the time he was there and had his own imagination of what kind of place would be suitable for us. Consequently, the day he showed us through the 3rd floor flat in the panilak he apologized and suggested we could live there temporarily until we found something else.

Parked in front of the building, Dali said, “Leave the suitcases and trunks in the van. We can get them later. Let’s go up.”

We climbed the four or five open stairs made of cement onto a wide cement slab with a locked double door in front of us. Dali rang a bell that soon buzzed and unlocked the door so we could enter. From the entryway, we walked up one flight to a landing where there was a door to an open elevator shaft. On each side of the landing was a door to a single flat. Dali pushed the button next to the elevator door and we could hear the elevator descend. Once it stopped at the landing, the door could be opened and we stepped onto the elevator floor, a small space designed for about three people. When the door shut behind us, Dali pushed the button for the third floor. The flat on the left as we exited the elevator would be our home for nearly eight years.

Three members of the church, an older woman and two young people, were finishing up some cleaning when we arrived. They greeted us and Dali showed us through the flat. I will describe it in my next blog post.

Once the others had gone, we walked with Dali down the long block to 13 Bernolakova, in the middle of the first building, and rode the elevator to the top floor where he and Laura lived. Their flat was owned by the church and was provided to him as the pastor.

They lived in a block of flats with eight outside entry doors like ours that had flights of stairs and an elevator. On each floor there were two flats, one to the left of the elevator and one to the right, a total of 16 flats times eight entries for a total of 128 flats in the single long building made of concrete panels.

Their building ended at 19 Bernolakova and ours began at 21 Bernolakova with a small walkway between buildings covered with graffiti. Ours was a longer building with 12 entry doors and a total of 192 flats. The last entry door was at 43 Bernolakova. Altogether there was one long block with 320 flats on one side of the street.

Although the four buildings on the other side of the street were shorter and at right angles to ours, together they contained another 256 flats.

Much larger densely populated areas like this could be found in most Slovak cities. They were built under the communist regime as the government took the land from rural families to create large state-owned farms and in exchange moved the families into small flats in cities.

By having just two facing flats on each floor, it was always possible to see the comings and goings of your neighbors. This made it easier for authorities to keep track of people and contributed to creating a deeply fearful, suspicious population.

Communism was overthrown in 1989 in Czechoslovakia in what was called the Velvet Revolution. In 1993 the country was divided into the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. When we arrived in 1997, the country was newly independent but the effects of communism on the thinking of the people remained.