c. 1999 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ If there were a special place in hell for wicked truckers, it might well look like the wretched Rostov truck stop located on the 8-lane highway that encircles this city.

Calling it a truck stop is being generous. There is no restaurant, no snack bar, no store, no toilet and no shower. In these conditions, the long-distance truckers from Russia’s provinces wait days and sometimes weeks for a load out of Moscow, paying a daily fee for the parking spot.

While waiting, the out-of-town truckers rarely leave the truck stop because of the likelihood of getting fined by police for violation of Moscow’s strict residence permit rules. Instead, the truckers are visited by vendors hawking foodstuffs by day and Ukrainian prostitutes by night.

If all that is not enough, the Rostov truck stop is located on top of a dump filled with radioactive waste measured at levels several times higher than is considered safe. Even in Russia, it doesn’t get much worse than this.

The promise of salvation, however, is not far away.

On the edge of the truck stop near the rubber water hose used for showers and inside a white tractor-trailer rig emblazoned in Russian with”Mobile Christian Group”, two clean-cut men in button-down shirts preach redemption and eternal life.”The drivers need us more than anyone else needs us,”said Pyotr Ryazanov, 38, a Baptist and former trucker.”If we didn’t come to them, they would have no contact with the church at all.” Funded by the Pennsylvania-based Transport for Christ, the mobile chapel has made the rounds of Moscow’s truck stops since 1994. Weekdays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., truckers are welcome to come in, sit on the chapel’s simple benches, drink tea, eat cookies and talk about God. Sometimes Ryazonov or his partner, Alexander Voprov, show American-made videos about Jesus or Darwin’s theory of evolution or the lives of early Christians.

On a typical day, three or four truckers will visit the chapel to talk and pray, most often for a load to haul home. As day after day of waiting for a load passes drivers grow more and more anxious as their profit margins are eroded by the truck stop’s $2-a-day parking fee.

One hot summer afternoon, Andrei Bondarenko, 30, had been waiting for 25 days for a cargo for his modest-sized, 38-year-old GAZ truck. With a wife and two children waiting for him in his hometown 18 hours south of Moscow, Bondarenko said he was getting tired of sleeping on the truck’s cramped front seat, of cooking his meals on a small propane stove in the truck’s rear and of using a nearby field as a toilet.

Bondarenko said he was indifferent toward the mobile chapel.”It is of no kind of help to me,”said Bondarenko, a quiet man who flashed a solitary gold tooth when he smiled.”We are worried about bread, not God.” Vladimir Shapranov, a driver waiting four days for a load, chimed in,”What is this needed for? We went through all this in childhood. Your parents told you there was no God. Your grandmother told you there was.” With such attitudes, Ryazonov said it has been heavy going on the conversion front. About 30 drivers have become believers since the operation started nearly five years ago. Ryazonov, a burly man with a friendly manner, added,”But there may be many we don’t know about. Ones who came to God after leaving us.” Most truckers are nominally Muslims, Buddhists or, most frequently, Russian Orthodox. If a trucker decides to start attending church, Ryazonov and Voprov direct him to a Baptist church in his hometown,”so they can get baptized like in the Bible,”Ryazonov said.

For the Orthodox, the practice of re-baptism is highly offensive because it questions the legitimacy of the rites of the 1,000-year-old Russian Orthodox Church. Ryazonov explained his reasoning,”90 percent of them are baptized.”But how many of them understand what that means or have read the Bible? Practically none.” In spiritual terms, the mobile chapel has little competition on the circular highway, one of Russia’s busiest. At one nearby truck stop, however, an Orthodox priest blesses trucks _ for a fee.”Truckers are always getting asked for something: ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme.’ From the traffic cops and from bandits but mostly from the traffic police. They are the biggest racket,”said Ryazonov.”So, sometimes, they are afraid to come here because they think we will want something, too.”DEA END BROWN