00:00Once you're baptised they put you in your place and now you have to behave and
00:03be a good Jehovah's Witness, otherwise you'll get kicked out.
00:12My name is Eva, I'm originally from Latvia. I was recruited as one of Jehovah's Witnesses
00:17at age of 14 and a half and then 22 years later I left, probably age seven or eight,
00:25when I was first told by somebody, do you know there's a God? I'm like, wow. I think
00:33there was sort of a euphoria when everything opened up after being banned, people flocked
00:41to churches, people were interested in even when these groups would knock on the door or give out
00:47their literature. It was just, would you like a Bible study? And I was 14 and a half and we thought,
00:55well why not? I started studying the Bible with Witnesses in March 1996. There was this sense that
01:02Armageddon is coming any time soon. Once you're baptised they put you in your place and now you
01:08have to behave and be a good Jehovah's Witness, otherwise you'll get kicked out and nobody will
01:14ever talk to you again. I didn't really have any family apart from my mum, as my dad died when I
01:21was 10. So you have to kind of make friends among Jehovah's Witnesses. I was still at school so
01:30there were people I would talk to. When you told them you were one of Jehovah's Witnesses they were
01:35terrified and in that first year I got baptised, a 17 year old would refuse blood and the parents
01:43obviously refused it and she died because they couldn't give her a life-saving treatment.
01:49And I think after that happened I didn't really advertise I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses at
01:57school because it was making my life difficult. I just sort of kept myself to myself. I was told
02:04that Jehovah's Witnesses are not supposed to go out or marry anyone who's not a Jehovah's Witness
02:11and if you do it's classed as disobedience. You can't really choose who you fall in love with
02:18so me and their grandson we sort of started seeing each other secretly. I actually got engaged
02:27pretty quick and then it came out and I had people writing nasty letters to me from the
02:35English congregation in Ripley and I got pulled up by the elders in Riga.
02:42It was like an interrogation for about two hours, they wanted to know every single detail.
02:47Sat me down and put one of their videos on about Jehovah's Witnesses should not make friends with
02:54those who are not Jehovah's Witnesses and definitely not date them. It wasn't really
02:58their place it just something in me just did not want to go along with it and I just said well I'm
03:06going to think about it and obviously people stopped talking to me and avoided me because
03:11now I had a bad reputation for dating somebody who wasn't a Jehovah's Witness.
03:17I want my children to have the freedom to do whatever they want. If they want to go to university
03:22they go to university and that was another reason I just wanted them out of my life so that
03:32they can have a future. I'm able to explore things in life that I couldn't before and
03:37for myself and my children we really love our life now. I know I'm 42 but it's not too late to go
03:46back to university, you know something that I could have done when I was 18. Do your research,
03:54take your time, do not let anybody pressure you and decide what's best for you regardless of what
04:03people say.
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