Source: Forum 18, December 16, 2016
Three pensioners were fined more than two months’ pension for praying with hospice residents and offering New Testaments. [All three] pensioners, between the ages of 61 and 72, are members of Rodnik Baptist Church in Oskemen. For many years the church has helped residents of the privately run Zhandauren Hospice with clothes, wheelchairs, and medicines.
“The place is quite poor, sad, and depressing,” one church member told Forum 18, “and the 100 or so lonely elderly residents rarely have any visitors. Some of them live there for years, forsaken by their children or relatives, either unable to care for themselves or having no other place to live, and some require round-the-clock care.”
On the afternoon of October 14, the three women brought tea and sweets for the residents, talking to and praying with some of them and offering copies of the New Testament.
“Our ladies only visited and met with those who invited them to come,” the church member added. “They did not impose themselves or their care on anyone, nor did they create any disturbance. The staff, particularly the head manager, were always open and happy to see them and others from Rodnik there and had no objections.”
However, on the afternoon of October 14, about ten officials “in dark clothes” suddenly arrived, Kerbele noted. “They split us up, wouldn’t listen to us, and wouldn’t answer our questions as to what it was about and what had happened,” she later told the news website Ratel.kz. “We couldn’t take one step left or one step right.” She recalled that she had been questioned “as if I had done something terrible.”
» Read full story. From another part of Central Asia, see Azerbaijani Christians Fined over Illegal Prayer Meeting (World Watch Monitor).