This experience reminds me of another couple I know. They were serving in Brooklyn Bethel. The husband had been there for more than thirty years. When the organization began downsizing last year, this couple was assigned to serve in the Republic of Georgia, located in southwest Asia and once part of the Soviet Union. The husband viewed the assignment as “Jehovah’s will” despite the fact that he and his wife did not know the language, were being sent to a country that has cracked down on Jehovah’s Witnesses and their preaching activity, and is on the brink of civil war. They would be given a small monthly allowance to live on and would have living quarters assigned to them at the branch office. This only told me just how deep the mind control this cult exercises over its members really is.
On the other hand, since the husband had spent his entire working life either pioneering or working in Brooklyn Bethel, he had no marketable skills for a job in the real world. He is also approaching sixty and has no retirement fund or any savings. So what else was he going to do when ordered to Georgia? He had done nothing with his non-Witness family for decades, so he may have thought that they would not help him. He had foregone having children “for the sake of the kingdom” as well. In the end, he may not have had any choice, but I would rather take my chances in the real world than accept a dangerous foreign assignment in a country riven by sectarian and ethnic strife which is also hostile to the WTS.
Quendi
