Hey everybody, this is Heidi St. John. Welcome to Off the Bench with Heidi St. John. Today is Thursday, July 23rd. This is episode 964. I'm so glad that you guys are here today because a very special friend is in the studio with me.

Asterra Bondarev is here to tell her story of her family's escape from communism. This is part one of two. Stick around. I think you're going to be encouraged.

So I mentioned last week that I'm going to be speaking for the reimagined education conference next next week. If you guys are feeling overwhelmed, that's okay. There's a lot of us feeling overwhelmed right now.

The conference is in person for a limited audience. Thank you, Rona, as well as online and happening July 27th through August 1st. We're going to cover time management organization, marriage enrichment and the commonly asked question these days. Can I even do this thing? And that's just for starters. So by the way, the answer is yes, you can absolutely homeschool find the link to register at Heidi St. John.com forward slash events tickets are $10. I also want to let you guys know that you are going to be able to get a free ticket.

You can leave me a voicemail and I'm not even kidding. If you do, I might play it on the air. So be sure and tell me if that's not what you want when you call and you got to be kind. If I don't like your tone of voice, we're not going to air your question. All right. That'd be great. Look in the description of the podcast and you're going to find a link. That's different by the way than the show notes. It's actually a link that's available when you read the description of the podcast. Give it a try. It's kind of fun. All right. You guys without further ado, I'm going to introduce a guest to you that I first heard.

I'm going to speak a couple of weeks ago. She has a powerful story. You guys have been hearing me talk now for at least a couple of years about what I have been observing happening in American society. Partly, we've seen the quieting of the church.

The church is unwillingness to engage in politics to engage in what's talking and talking about what's happening around us. And you heard me two weeks ago talk about the Marxist takeover of the United States in a podcast that I entitled Marxism at the door of America.

I'm excited today because my friend Estara is here today and she has a really powerful story. And I've asked her to come and talk to you guys because she knows firsthand what it's like to live under a totalitarian regime.

And she's got a powerful story. Estara, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Heidi. It's great to be here. You're pretty brave. I mean, this was sort of just spur the moment. I was like, hey, you're here at this. You're here in the friendly planet homeschool resource center. And you've got a story to tell. Yeah.

And you said you do it. So you you got to have some hoots bug girl. Oh, yeah. And it's not just me. It's the whole Slavic community. They all have stories. We we can learn a lot from our great grandparents, our grandparents who immigrated here and ran away from tyranny, communism. Yeah.

First hand, they they went through prosecution for their faith. Yeah, many men and women were prosecuted for their faith for not denying Christ because under communism regime.

It's literally like their own form of religion that they will not accept or tolerate any other religion. And they will make an example out of you. So where did you where were you born? I was born in the Ukraine. All right. Right by the Romanian border.

There's a village there in a city chair, no, see. And that's we immigrated here in 1992. I was six years old. And why did your parents leave? Because of communism. The second we had an opportunity. We waited 10 years for our application to be approved. And the second we got that opportunity.

We packed our bags. No English, just couple bags. And we immigrated here with my grandpa and his children, five kids and then my mom and me and my brother. So we were like a big family that came everyone and no English left everything behind and started a new life.

And we knew that we knew that this was the land of opportunity and the land of freedom. And even with no English, we all made something out of ourselves. And we all thrive and have businesses. And it's just a better life for our children and our children's children.

I'm not sure if you're understanding. So I've been talking about this for several years telling people listen, something is very wrong in this country. And if you thought Barack Obama was bad, Biden is Barack Obama on steroids. Absolutely. And when I hear people tell me that Biden is leading the polls for spinal believe the polls.

Biden is leading in the polls. My first thought is people do not understand what we are up against. So when you say you, it smells familiar to you. What are you talking about what kinds of things are you seeing happening in America right now that give you that give you reason to worry.

Already the closing of the church close your doors. This doesn't come overnight. They they strip away your freedom slowly to the point like what what new some did in California. You think

that's just that's little by little. And before you know it, that is oppression before you know it. We're going to wake up and say, how did we get here? We can't even open our doors anymore. That's what's happening. They don't do it overnight. The enemy is very sneaky. He's not new at this game.

History is repeating itself. And when I realized our fight is much harder now because we've been asleep, not just the Slavic community, even Americans. Well, Americans have been sleeping for a long time. You know, but the Slavic were.

No, because they okay, so they ran away from this right. So they thought they'd never have to worry about this again. So that's why they sat quiet because why would they want to relive those horrible, horrible memories.

I don't blame them. I get it because that's that's a heavy oppression. They went through. They ran from that. I understand why they don't want to bring it up. But that silence.

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